“It is enough for me, and I do not want to plague myself with pumping up patriotism and pouring it into stanzas.”

His humorous resistance to the expectation that he should turn every public occasion into verse · Letter, The Victim of Correspondents

• Independence
• Poetry
• Writing

“Nothing is easier than to make disadvantageous comparisons between ourselves and our neighbors.”

A useful warning against measuring one's life unfairly against other people · Letter to Phineas Barnes

• Comparison
• Judgement
• Self

“When I read in a book it was the page or the paragraph that I wanted, and which left its impression and became a part of my intellectual furniture.”

Describing reading as the selective gathering of ideas that become part of the mind · Autobiographical Notes

• Books
• Mind
• Reading