My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

As long as parents and teachers in general shall fall under the established rule, it is clear that politics and modes of government will educate and infect us all. They poison our minds, before we can resist, or so much as suspect their malignity. Like the barbarous directors of the Eastern seraglios, they deprive us of our vitality, and fit us for their despicable employment from the cradle.

Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.

Duty is that mode of action on the part of the individual which constitutes the best possible application of his capacity to the general benefit.

I shall attempt to prove two things: first, that the actions and dispositions of mankind are the offspring of circumstances and events, and not of any original determination that they bring into the world; and, secondly, that the great stream of our voluntary actions essentially depends, not upon the direct and immediate impulses of sense, but upon the decisions of the understanding.

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

Study with desire is real activity; without desire it is but the semblance and mockery of activity.