The people know that they need in their representative much more than talent, namely, the power to make his talent trusted.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.

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

In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist