The peace of the man who has forsworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace, but a canting impotence.

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship

[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatest of the soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported without the latter.

I am old, yet I look at wise men and see that I am very young. I look over those stars yonder, and into the myriads of the aspirant and ordered souls, and see I am a stranger and a youth and have yet my spurs to win. Too ridiculous are these airs of age.

Good nature is stronger than tomahawks.