Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.
What is the history of mighty kingdoms and nations, but a detail of the ravages and cruelties of the powerful over the weak?
May your mind be thoroughly impressed with the absolute necessity of universal virtue and goodness, as the only sure road to happiness, and may you walk therein with undeviating steps.
A people may let a king fall, yet still remain a people, but if a king let his people slip from him, he is no longer a king.
Let your observations and comparisons produce in your mind an abhorrence of domination and power, the parent of slavery, ignorance, and barbarism, which places man upon a level with his fellow tenants of the woods.
I can hear of the brilliant accomplishments of any of my sex with pleasure and rejoice in that liberality of sentiment which acknowledges them.
What is meat for one is not for another – no accounting for fancy.
I acknowledge myself a unitarian.
The great fish swallow up the small; and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government.
History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and most active.
Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex.
Deliver me from your cold, phlegmatic preachers, politicians, friends, lovers and husbands.
These are the times when a genius wants to live.
How difficult the task to quench the fire and the pride of private ambition, and to sacrifice ourselves and all our hopes and expectations to the public weal! How few have souls capable of so noble an undertaking!
O, I have read his Heart in his wicked eyes many a time. The very devil is in them.
I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature...
I hope some future day will bring me the happiness of seeing my family again collected under our own roof, happy in ourselves and blessed in each other.
These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.
The theater has been called the pulse of the people.
We are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act.
If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunites of seeing the world, and obtaining a knowledge of Mankind than any of your cotemporarys, that you have never wanted a Book, but it has been supplied you, that your whole time has been spent in the company of Men of Literature and Science. How unpardonable would it have been in you, to have been a Blockhead.