"In 1840 I was called from my farm to undertake the administration of public affairs and I foresaw that I was called to a bed of thorns. I now leave that bed which has afforded me little rest, and eagerly seek repose in the quiet enjoyments of rural life."

"If the tide of defamation and abuse shall turn, and my administration come to be praised, future Vice-Presidents who may succeed to the Presidency may feel some slight encouragement to pursue an independent course."

"Tyler had all the dignified charm and grace of the soft, warm manner typical of the well-bred Southerner of the early nineteenth century. He mixed readily with strangers of his class. Around working people, however, he became a different person- ill at ease, aloof, unresponsive. Some took this for vanity. But, as biographer Robert Seager pointed out, "What appeared to be vanity was an ingrained shyness and discomfort in the presence of people with dirty fingernails... He never had any experience with these people, and he was too diffident to gain any.""

"Popularity, I have always thought, may aptly be compared to a coquette—the more you woo her, the more apt is she to elude your embrace."

"Let it, then, be henceforth proclaimed to the world, that man's conscience was created free; that he is no longer accountable to his fellow man for his religious opinions, being responsible therefore only to his God."

"Patronage is the sword and cannon by which war may be made on the liberty of the human race."

"We have built no national temples but the Capitol; we consult no common oracle but the Constitution."

"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."

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

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

"Its constitution the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence."

"A book is the only immortality."

"Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument."

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

"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."

"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."