The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought

The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics andtrade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.

There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us?

We are very near to greatness: one step and we are safe; can we not take the leap?

The idea of God ends in a paltry Methodist meeting-house.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous or when they are most luxurious-they are conservatives after dinner.

We are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be explored. "What we know is a point to what we do not know."