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

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.

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

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