The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in minorities.

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?

All nobility in its beginnings was somebody's natural superiority.