What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.
The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.
History begins in novel and ends in essay.
Boswell is the first of biographers.
A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men.