You may regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer, but if you cannot, mind your own business.

With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house.

Governments have their origin in the moral identity of men.

Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows.

There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned tomorrow.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.