Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.

For everything you gain, you lose something.

When some external event raises your spirits and you think good days are preparing for you, do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.

Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.