"Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from December to March, inclusive, she is to be found in the bare ruin of her winter, as truly beautiful as in the full bloom of sum…"

"The Radicals are a set of men who would pull down everything, and build up nothing."

"Reflect upon your present blessings—of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some."

"I am the most intensely and profusely social of all men, but I must have a quantity of clear, solitary, penetrating, and uncomforting observation."

"The English are, so far as I know, the hardest worked people on whom the sun shines. Be content if in their wretched intervals of leisure they read for amusement and do no worse."