Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.
Moderation is commonly firm, and firmness is commonly successful.
Patience and submission are very carefully to be distinguished from cowardice and indolence. We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle; for the calamities of life, like the necessities of Nature, are calls to labor and diligence.
The process is the reality.
We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
The business of life is to go forward.
This was a good dinner enough, to be sure, but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.
None but a fool worries about things he cannot influence.
To be free it is not enough to beat the system, one must beat the system every day.
As to precedents, to be sure they will increase in course of time; but the more precedents there are, the less occasion is there for law; that is to say, the less occasion is there for investigating principles.
Sir, it is wrong to stir up law-suits; but when once it is certain that a law-suit is to go on, there is nothing wrong in a lawyer’s endeavouring that he shall have the benefit, rather than another.
There ambush here relentless ruffians lay, And here the fell attorney prowls for prey.
To embarrass justice by multiplicity of laws, or to hazard it by confidence in judges, seem to be the opposite rocks on which all civil institutions have been wrecked, and between which legislative wisdom has never yet found an open passage.
Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
He left the name at which the world grew pale, To point a moral, or adorn a tale.
To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which if not a virtue, is the groundwork of a virtue.
If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.
Bias and impartiality are in the eye of the beholder.
As the mind must govern the hands, so in every society the man of intelligence must direct the man of labor.