It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

The borrower runs in his own debt.

The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.

To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of charactermakes the state unnecessary. The wise man is the State.