Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.

The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics andtrade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.

The ancestor of every action is thought; when we understand that we begin to comprehend that our world is governed by thought and that everything without had its counterpart originally within the mind.

A cheerful intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough. For it indicates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained.

Do not spill thy soul in running hither and yon, grieving over the mistakes and the vices of others. The one person whom it is most necessary to reform is yourself.

No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward!

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.