Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity.

The friend who holds up before me the mirror, conceals not my smallest faults, warns me kindly, reproves me affectionately, when I have not performed my duty, he is my friend, however little he may appear so. But if a man praises and lauds me, never reproves me, overlooks my faults, and forgives them before I have repented, he is my enemy, however much he may appear my friend.

It is easier to make a lady of a peasant-girl than a peasant-girl of a lady.

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.

Those that embrace the entire universe with love, for the most part love nothing, but their narrow selves.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Everyone loves his own country, customs, language, wife, children, not because they are the best in the world, but because they are his established property, and he loves in them himself, and the labor he has bestowed on them. The working of revolutions, therefore, 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.