Hope is the best part of our riches. What sufficeth it that we have the wealth of the Indies in our pockets, if we have not the hope of heaven in our souls?
Difficulties, by bracing the mind to overcome them, assist cheerfulness, as exercise assists digestion.
Like the withered roses of a once gay garland, the feelings of youth command in age a melancholy interest.
When we have the means to pay for what we desire, what we get is not so much what is best, as what is costliest.
Dreamers are half-way men of thought, and men of thought are half-way men of action.
The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.
A mother’s love is indeed the golden link that binds youth to age; and he is still but a child, however time may have furrowed his cheek, or silvered his brow, who can yet recall, with a softened heart, the fond devotion, or the gentle chidings, of the best friend that God gives us.
There are some weaknesses that are peculiar and distinctive to generous characters, as freckles are to a fair skin.
Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.
The loveliest faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy.
Economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.
The worst deluded are the self-deluded.
The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.
The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.
All good writing leaves something unexpressed.
It is invidious to distinguish particular men as adventurers: we are all such.
Excellence in art is largely the result of attention to minutiae, and – prayer.
In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose – one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it.
The natural wants are few, and easily gratified: it is only those which are artificial that perplex us by their multiplicity.
The very cunning conceal their cunning; the indifferently shrewd boast of it.