On the human imagination events produce the effects of time.

He who has travelled far and seen much is apt to fancy that he has lived long.

What seems venerable by an accumulation of changes, is reduced to familiarity when we come seriously to consider it solely in connection with time.

Whatever may be the changes produced by man, the eternal round of the seasons is unbroken. Summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, return in their stated order, with a sublime precision, affording to man one of the noblest of all the occasions he enjoys of proving the high powers of his far-reaching mind, in compassing the laws that control their exact uniformity, and in calculating their never-ending revolutions.

Prejudice ... this tyrant of the human mind, which rushes on its prey through a thousand avenues, almost as soon as men begin to think and feel, and which seldom relinquishes his iron sway until they cease to do either.

Have you never felt how pleasant it is to listen to the laugh of the girl you love?

Every man must meet his own debts, and answer for his own sins.

His eyes opened with that anxious, distended gaze, which is apt to accompany the passage of a soul surprised by death.

What is one warrior against a tribe?

Sin and hypocrisy are hot jackets, as they will find who put them on.

'Tis nat'ral for women to enter into their husband's victories and defeats.

If we could understand all we see, Sarpent, there might be not only sense but safety in refusin' to give faith to any one thing that we might find oncomprehensible; but when there's so many things, about which it may be said we know nothin' at all, why there's little use, and no reason in bein' difficult touchin' any one in partic'lar.

An open spot on a mountain side, where a wide look can be had at the heavens and the 'arth, is a most judicious place for a man to get a just idee of the power of the Manitou, and of his own littleness.

If the Lord made man first out of 'arth, as they tell me it is written in the Bible, then turns him into dust at death, I see no great difficulty in the way to bringin' him back in the body, though ashes be the only substance left.

But of all the doctrines, Sarpent, that which disturbs me, and disconsarts my mind the most, is the one which teaches us to think that a pale-face goes to one heaven, and a red-skin to another; it may separate in death them which lived much together, and loved each other well in life!

We all love the wonderful, and when it comes attended by chivalrous self-devotion and a rigid regard to honour, it presents itself to our admiration in a shape doubly attractive.

It is seldom men think of death in the pride of their health and strength.

I strive to do right here, as the surest means of keeping all right hereafter.

I can't see no great difference atween givin' up territory afore a war, out of a dread of war, and givin' it up after a war, because we can't help it--unless it be that the last is the most manful and honourable.

Truth was the Deerslayer's polar-star. He ever kept it in view; and it was nearly impossible for him to avoid uttering it, even when prudence demanded silence.

We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true, though, happily, for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating if not excusing its crimes.

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