The greater speed and success that distinguish the planting of the human race in this country, over all other plantations in history, owe themselves mainly to the new subdivisions of the State into small corporations of land and power.

We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.

All great natures delight in stability; all great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties.

Instead of making Christianity a vehicle of truth, you make truth only a horse for Christianity.

We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought forthe morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.

'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal study to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the best economist.

It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervadedand dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.