The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time. |
The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man confronts a fact |
The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. |
The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine. |
The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body. |
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. |
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. |
The heart is forever inexperienced. |
The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it |
The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams. |
The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid; so far behind the speaker's lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated. |
The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot. |
The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day. |
The language of friendship is not words but meanings. |
The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free. |