If one waits for the right time to come before writing, the right time never comes.

The material of thought re-acts upon the thought itself.

Evil springs up, and flowers, and bears no seed, And feeds the green earth with its swift decay, Leaving it richer for the growth of truth.

Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote.

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.

Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise.

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