We acquire the strength we have overcome.

There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.

Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?"

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

The best of life is conversation.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science, and such is the mechanical determination of our age, and so recent are our best contrivances, that use has not dulled our joy and pride in them. These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a godlike ease and power.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.