O thou who art able to write a book which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner.

We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, - the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish.

Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.

One is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is not evil to be poor.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Teaching school is but another word for sure and not very slow destruction.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.