“It is not the ship so much as the skillful sailing that assures the prosperous voyage.”

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

A journal should be neither an echo nor a pander.

Criticism is not construction, it is observation.

Virtue does not truly reward her votary if she leaves him sad and half doubtful whether it would not have been better to serve vice.

While we read history we make history.

Stratagem is the right hand of cunning.

Prussia is great because her people are intelligent. They know the alphabet. The alphabet is conquering the world.

The Pride of ancestry increases in the ratio of distance.

For nature makes women to be won, and men to win.

The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose.

Every great crisis of human history is a pass of Thermopylae, and there is always a Leonidas and his three hundred to die in it, if they can not conquer.

Heroes in history seem to us poetic because they are there. But if we should tell the simple truth of some of our neighbors, it would sound like poetry.

Books of entertainment first led Adam Clarke to believe in a spiritual world.

A man’s country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.

A river is the cosiest of friends. You must love it and live with it before you can know it.

The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows.

That just laws which uphold human rights are the necessary foundation of peace and security would be denied only by closed minds which interpret peace as the silence of all opposition and security as the assurance of their own power.

Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past.

I came then to a conviction that has never left me: that there is too much for me to attend to in this mortal life without overspeculation on the immortal, that it is not necessary to my peace of mind or to my effort to be a decent and useful person, to have a definite assurance about the affairs of the next world.

Scriptural hope is not wishful thinking. It’s rock-solid assurance!

Clothes have always had a wonderful influence on my physical well-being as well as my self-assurance.

In all thy undertakings, let a reasonable assurance animate thy endeavors if thou despairest of success, thou shalt not succeed.

You can point to these things, and you can have that assurance.

I can assure you that my first and foremost interest is my country. This is not a personal matter. We are not people driven by a wish to be in the government since it is for us the least attractive work, even though we are politicians.