So says the most ancient book of the Earth; thus it is written on its leaves of marble, lime, sand, slate, and clay: ... that our Earth has fashioned itself, from its chaos of substances and powers, through the animating warmth of the creative spirit, to a peculiar and original whole, by a series of preparatory revolutions, till at last the crown of its creation, the exquisite and tender creature man, was enabled to appear.

To think what is true, to sense what is beautiful and to want what is good, hereby the spirit finds purpose of a life in reason.

Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant. There is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.

It is a hard but good law of fate, that as every evil, so every excessive power, wears itself out.

Thus we build on the ice, thus we write on the waves of the sea; the waves roaring pass away, the ice melts, and away goes our palace, like our thoughts.

The working of revolutions misleads me no more; it is as necessary to our race as its waves to the stream, that it may not be a stagnant marsh. Ever renewed in its forms, the genius of humanity blossoms.

The savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species