The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

A man's action is only a poicture book of his creed.

The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science, and such is the mechanical determination of our age, and so recent are our best contrivances, that use has not dulled our joy and pride in them. These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a godlike ease and power.