“A tree which has lost its head will never recover it again, and will survive only as a monument of the ignorance and folly of its Tormentor.”

In the journey of the year, the autumn is Venice, spring is Naples, certainly, and the majestic maturity of summer is Rome.

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.

Audubon’s works are the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology.

I think that’s become passe, but if you can surround yourself with a kind of monument to yourself and your family – a statement – and you can afford it, then that’s a noble project.

I just wish this social institution [religion] wasnt based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isnt true.

An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.

A contempt of the monuments and the wisdom of the past, may be justly reckoned one of the reigning follies of these days, to which pride and idleness have equally contributed.

The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory; and any man who does, is not worthy of one.

Mountains are earth’s undecaying monuments.