Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.

Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

Be not a slave of words.

Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky; but the stars are there and will reappear.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.