“Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.”

“How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?”

“I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.”

“Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”

“Under a goverment which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison”

“Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.”

“Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.”