All that happens in the world of Nature or Man, - every war; every peace; every hour of prosperity; every hour of adversity; every election; every death ; every life; every success and every failure, - all change, - all permanence, - the perished leaf; the unutterable glory of stars, - all things speak truth to the thoughtful spirit.

Rufus Choate

Categorized in : War Stars Adversity

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading.

Rufus Choate

passionate youth reading

Anything more low, obscene, feculent, the manifold heaving's of history have not cast up. We shall come to the worship of onions, cats and things vermiculite.

Rufus Choate

onions cat worship

We have built no temple but the Capitol. We consult no common oracle but the Constitution.

Rufus Choate

oracles temples common

Power, carried to extremes, is always liable to reaction.

Rufus Choate

liable reactions power

Its Constitution--the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.

Rufus Choate

oratory independence constitution

I will look, your Honor, and endeavor to find a precedent, if you require it; though it would seem to be a pity that the Court should lose the honor of being the first to establish so just a rule.

Rufus Choate

honor law looks

A book is the only immortality.

Rufus Choate

immortality reading book

Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument.

Rufus Choate

irony argument sarcasm

No lawyer can afford to be ignorant of the Bible.

Rufus Choate

bible-study ignorant lawyer

Appropriated to justice, to security, to reason, to restraint; where there is no respect of persons; where will is nothing and power is nothing and numbers are nothing, and all are equal and all secure before the law.

Rufus Choate

equality law numbers

The final end of government is not to exert restraint but to do good.

Rufus Choate

finals government ends

There was a state without king or nobles; there was a church without a bishop; there was a people governed by grave magistrates which it had selected, and by equal laws which it had framed.

Rufus Choate

kings law people

Knowledge is power as well as fame.

Rufus Choate

knowledge-is-power fame knowledge

You don't want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power.

Rufus Choate

association air want

Mathematics may, be briefly defined as the science of quantities, and is one of the most important of disciplining studies which engage the practical student.

Rufus Choate

important students may

The courage of New England was the courage of conscience. It did not rise to that insane and awful passion, the love of war for itself.

Rufus Choate

passion insane war

We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag and I keep step to the music of the Union.

Rufus Choate

patriotism party doe