Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go.

A person's life is limited but serving the people is limitless. I want to devote my limited life to serving the people limitlessly.

We walk alone in the world.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

We have feudal governments in a commercial age. It would be but an easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private emperor a fee for services, as we pay an architect, an engineer, or a lawyer. If any man has talent for righting wrong, for administering difficult affairs, for counselling poor farmers how to turn their estates to good husbandry, for combining a hundred private enterprises to a general benefit, let him in the county- town, or in Court-street, put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, Governor, Mr. Johnson, Working king.

Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.

I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.