We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.
Nothing can be preserved that is not good.
Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.
The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.
The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.
Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.
People suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is impossible for a person to be cheated by anyone but himself.
Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.
In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.
People say law but they mean wealth.
What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects.
Our expenses are all for conformity.
There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.
A home kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.
It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.