The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

No man can help another without helping himself.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved, by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face, with the most disagreeable sensation.

Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

A nation never falls but by suicide.