In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and the misery of others, than in the country; for they are constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.

True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.

Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straight forward and simple integrity in another.

The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation; as a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum.

The art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and hearers wise enough to read.

None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them; such persons covet secrets as a spendthrift covets money, for the purpose of circulation.

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

Let those who would affect singularity with success first determine to be very virtuous, and they will be sure to be very singular.

Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.

Deliberate with caution, but act with decision and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness.

The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.

We the people have no excuse for starry-eyed sycophantic group-think in the Information Age. Knowledge is but a fingertip away.

Once you can write an alphabet, you can write a book of 100 million pages. It's just a matter of believing it as possible, and taking the cross millimetre by millimetre.

We are much too tolerant of the moral aberration of statesmen and bureaucrats.

Anger is the rising up of the heart in passionate displacency against an apprehended evil, which would cross or hinder us of some desired good.

Money is a kind of poetry.

Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.

People are waiting in line for 15 years before they get rejected, O.K.? That's why people don't want to invest in America.

She could smell the pages. She could almost taste the words as they stacked up around her.

Retreat might give us a moment of respite but years of repentance at our weakness would, I believe, follow.

When I started getting into West Coast rap - The Game, then I started studying a lot of Tupac Shakur and watching his interviews.