Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural.

Men praise poverty, as the African worships Mumbo Jumbo--from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate at.

The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.

Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse of its features it disappears.

A man does not plant a tree for himself; he plants it for posterity.

If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.

Thoughts must come naturally, like wild-flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed, even although aided by the leaf-mould of your past.