Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

A great man will find a great subject, or which is the same thing, make any subject great.

If you love and serve man, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape remuneration.

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.