The men who carry their points do not need to inquire of their constituents what they should say, but are themselves the country which they represent: nowhere are its emotions or opinions so instant and so true as in them; nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion.

The life of truth is cold.

He who travels in search of something which he has not got, travels away from himself and grows old even in youth among old things.

Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

Education should be as broad as man.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age.