The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.

The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.

There is nothing earthly that lasts so well, as money. A man's learning dies with him, as does his virtues fade out of remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live and keep his memory green.

Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart with divine love in it beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes.

A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.