There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law.
A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill.
The dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living.
Manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth.
There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.
Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.
Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.
The populace drags down the gods to their own level.
We never touch but at points.
The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.
No man has ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him.
Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?
The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.
Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.
The only thing that can grow is the thing you give energy to.
Life only avails, not the having lived.
Our people are slow to learn the wisdom of sending character instead of talent to Congress. Again and again they have sent a man of great acuteness, a fine scholar, a fine forensic orator, and some master of the brawls has crunched him up in his hands like a bit of paper.
Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.
Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.