You must let go of a thing for a new one to come to you.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man, imprisonedin mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events.

Quotation confesses inferiority.

The crime which bankrupts men and states is job-work-declining from your main design, to serve a turn here and there. Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life, nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that. I think we are entitled here to draw a straight line and say that society can never prosper but must always be bankrupts, until every man does that which he was created to do.

On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.