No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation: and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.

A man should carry nature in his head.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.

The instinct of the people is right.

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule,equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.