How painful to give a gift to any person of sensibility, or of equality! It is next worst to receiving one

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.

Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena.

We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young anddodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.

It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.