Spreuken over Natuur

The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature . . .

Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.

By Labor the North has subdued Nature, changed a parsimonious soil to fertility, built dwellings for almost her whole population, raised the school-house, established the Church, encircled the globe with her ships, and made her books and her papers to be as blades of grass and as leave of the Summer for number. But in the South, labor, a badge of shame, is the father of misery. The slave labors, but with no cheerit is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena.