Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential.

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride.

In the right hands, literature is not resorted to as a consolation, and by the broken and decayed, but as a decalogue.

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.

When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.