while you endeavor, by a good store of learning, to prepare yourself to become an useful and distinguished member of your country you must remember that this can never be, without uniting merit with your learning. honesty, disinterestedness, and good nature are indispensable to procure the esteem...

tranquility is the softest pillow for the head of old age; and the good will of those around us the sweetest soother of our repose. in this state of being, seasoned by occasional communications with my friends, I shall pass willingly to that eternal sleep which, whether with, or without, dreams,...

enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body & mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

I would strongly recommend to their consideration, instead of one immense building, to have a small one for every professorship, arranged at proper distances around a square, or rather three sides of a square, to admit extension, connected by a piazza so that they may go dry from one school to...

man … feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs not merely at an election, one day in the year, but every day; when there shall not be a man in the state who will not be a member of some one of it’s councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner...

I request you to procure for me 4. gross of bottles, the strong kind preferred & 12. gross of corks, the best, as bad ones is throwing away our liquor. there are two only of the Milton watermen who can be trusted with any thing which can be plundered or adulterated, Gilmer & Johnson....

for the present I confine myself to the physical want of some good Montepulciano ... perhaps I may trouble you annually to about the same amount, this being a very favorite wine, and habit having rendered the light and high flavored wines a necessary of life with me.

that to be independant for the comforts of life we must fabricate them ourselves.

I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.

if a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be. the functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty & property of their constituents. there is no safe deposit for these but with the...