Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

One must be an inventor to read well.

We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables.

The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.

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

We are shut up in school and college recitation rooms for ten to fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods. We cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse or a cow, of a dog, of a cat, of a spider. Far better was the Roman rule to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing.