Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,--a long way leading nowhere.

Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe.

Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;--and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.