Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.

A man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule him.

Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself.

Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see - not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.

As long as civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

The man for whom the law exists - the man of forms, the conservative - is a tame man.