He that loves reading has everything within his reach.
if admiration were not generally deemed the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lackey of poverty, the love of gain would cease to be an universal problem.
It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient.
A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and actions.
In the graver and more sentimental communication of man and man, the head still bears the superior sway; in the unreserved intimacies of man and woman, the heart is ever uppermost. Feeling is the main thing, and judgment passes for little.
Every boy learns more in his hours of play than in his hours of labor. In school, he lays in the materials of thinking, but in his sports, he actually thinks: he whets his faculties, and he opens his eyes.
If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.
I was famous in our college for calm and impassionate discussion; for one whole summer, I rose at five and went to bed at midnight, that I might have sufficient time for theology and metaphysics.
Every man has a certain sphere of discretion which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbours. This right flows from the very nature of man.
Extraordinary circumstances often bring along with them extraordinary strength. No man knows, till the experiment, what he is capable of effecting.
It is necessary for him who would endure existence with patience that he should conceive himself to be something – that he should be persuaded he is not a cipher in the muster-roll of man.
Superior virtue must be the fruit of superior intelligence.
The love of independence and dislike of unjust treatment is the source of a thousand virtues.
To diminish the cases in which the assistance of others is felt absolutely necessary is the only genuine road to independence.
I was brought up in great tenderness, and though my mind was proud to independence, I was never led to much independence of feeling.
The most desirable state of mankind is that which maintains general security with the smallest encroachment upon individual independence.
Love conquers all difficulties, surmounts all obstacles, and effects what to any other power would be impossible.
Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.
There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.
There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.
There is nothing that human imagination can figure brilliant and enviable that human genius and skill do not aspire to realize.
Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind.