Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason.

War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize.

One must be an inventor to read well.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.