There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it. A people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves or at the hands of another, who, succeeding to their power, take possession of their place, and upon their monuments write new names; such is history.

Repentance must be something more than mere remorse for sins: it comprehends a change of nature befitting heaven.

There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it. A people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves or at the hands of another, who, succeeding to their power, take possession of their place, and upon their monuments write new names; such is history.

All calculations based on experience elsewhere, fail in New Mexico.

Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.

A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his field of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer time.

Sympathy is in great degree a result of the mood we are in at the moment; anger forbids the emotion. On the other hand, it is easiest taken on when we are in a state of most absolute self-satisfaction.