Civilization is the lamb’s skin in which barbarism masquerades.
The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.
With the tears a Land hath shed. Their graves should ever be green.
Turn on its noiseless hinges, delicate sleep!
What probing deep Has ever solved the mystery of sleep?
So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.
Up from the dark the moon begins to creep; and now a pallid, haggard face lifts she above the water-line: thus from the deep a drowned body rises solemnly.
Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth.
This one sits shivering in Fortune’s smile, taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath. This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while laughs in the teeth of Death.
O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!
So precious life is! Even to the old, the hours are as a miser’s coins!
That was indeed to live – at one bold swoop to wrest from darkling death the best that death to life can give.
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well to leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast fold Sorrow’s children, soothe the hurts of Fate, lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel stay those who to thy sacred portals come to waste the gifts of Freedom.
At the beginning of the twentieth century barbarism can throw off its gentle disguise, and burn a man at the stake as complacently as in the Middle Ages.
Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs – putting in his oar, so to speak – with some pat word or sentence.
The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly.
The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it.
I like not lady-slippers, Nor yet the sweet-pea blossoms, Nor yet the flaky roses, Red or white as snow; I like the chaliced lilies, The heavy Eastern lilies, The gorgeous tiger-lilies, That in our garden grow.
What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.
My father invested his money so securely in the banking business that he was never able to get any of it out again.