The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

Spoons and skimmers you can be undistinguishably together; but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent, bilious nature has more truculent enemies than the slugs and moths that fret my leaves. Such a one has curculios, borers, knife-worms; a swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then smooth, plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as Moloch.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effiminated by position of nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer's boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.