The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.

Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love.

The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.

Men succeed when they realize that their failures are the preparation for their victories.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof?

On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant.