All nature seems at work.

Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles you read page after page without noticing the medium. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.

Tranquillity! thou better name Than all the family of Fame.

A Court has no right to strain the law because it causes hardship.

As long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate.

I do not wish you to act from these truths; no, still and always act from your feelings; only meditate often on these truths that sometime or other they may become your feelings.

A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.