A third felicity of age is that it has found expression. The youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has as yet no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts.

I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds.

Society is a hospital of incurables.

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take anything seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.