A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.

Nature is good, but intellect is better, as the law-giver is before the law-receiver.

I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity.

The Frenchman invented the ruffle; the Englishman added the shirt.

It is frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as then need is.

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object.