Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.
Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!
When the Artist rises high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible to mortal senses becomes of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possesses itself in the enjoyment of the reality.
What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.
Families are always rising and falling in America.
Sunlight is like the breath of life to the pomp of autumn.
Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster-and thank Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster – without man, as her acknowledged principal!
Insincerity in a man’s own heart must make all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic representation.
Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person’s expense!
It is very singular how the fact of a man’s death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them.
If cities were built by the sound of music, then some edifices would appear to be constructed by grave, solemn tones, – others to have danced forth to light fantastic airs.
Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate.
A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.
The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may going to prove one’s self a fool.
A man – poet, prophet, or whatever be may be – readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered.
Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries.
A vast deal of human sympathy runs along the electric line of needlework, stretching from the throne to the wicker chair of the humble seamstress.