Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.

The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it; We are happy now because God wills it.

It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how patient of overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no injury, while the other may be their ruin.

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.