General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.

Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.

Cowardice is not synonymous with prudence. It often happens that the better part of discretion is valor.

You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.

The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.

Books wind into the heart.

To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.