I eventually want to come back to Canada, to disappear, have nobody know me, and just be a writer and do what I want to do.
Truth is to the moral world what gravitation is to the material.
The world can absorb only doses of truth. . . too much would kill it.
The pious ones of Plymouth who, reaching the Rock, first fell upon their own knees and then upon the aborigines.
It is faith among men that holds the moral elements of society together, as it is faith in God that binds the world to his throne.
The dignity of the act is the deliberate, circumspect, open, and serene performance by these men in the clear light of day, and by a concurrent purpose, of a civic duty, which embraced the greatest hazards to themselves and to all the people from whom they held this deputed discretion, but which, to their sober judgments, promised benefits to that people and their posterity, from generation to generation, exceeding these hazards and commensurate with its own fitness.
Tracing the progress of mankind in the ascending path of civilization, and moral and intellectual culture, our fathers found that the divine ordinance of government, in every stage of the ascent, was adjustable on principles of common reason to the actual condition of a people, and always had for its objects, in the benevolent councils of the divine wisdom, the happiness, the expansion, the security, the elevation of society, and the redemption of man. They sought in vain for any title of authority of man over man, except of superior capacity and higher morality.
O innocence, how glorious and happy a portion art thou to the breast that possesses thee! thou fearest neither the eyes nor the tongues of men. Truth, the most powerful of all things, is thy strongest friend; and the brighter the light is in which thou art displayed, the more it discovers thy transcendent beauties.
If you don't know everything, you must go on with what you do know.
He had heard that women often love plain ordinary men, but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself and he could only love beautiful mysterious exceptional women.
Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death.