Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.

It is better to suffer injustice than to do it.

Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.

We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universalthat error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.

Whatever limits us we call fate.