Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labor equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal super-abundance.

When we consider the incidents of former days, and perceive, while reviewing the long line of causes, how the most important events of our lives originated in the most trifling circumstances; how the beginning of our greatest happiness or greatest misery is to be attributed to a delay, to an accident, to a mistake; we learn a lesson of profound humility.

Tolerance is the only real test of civilization.

The thing which makes one man greater than another, the quality by which we ought to measure greatness, is a man's capacity for loving.

They tell us that "Pity is akin to Love;" if so, Pity must be a poor relation.

Some persons, instead of making a religion for their God, are content to make a god of their religion.

Simple ignorance has in its time been complimented by the names of most of the vices, and of all the virtues.