It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organised dust - ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream.

Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?

Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!

Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished.