We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.

Go into one of our cool churches, and begin to count the words that might be spared, and in most places the entire sermon will go.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we must obey.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.