Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?

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.

We are pleased with one who instantly assents to our opinions, but we love a proselyte.

Men of much depth of mind can bear a great deal of counsel; for it does not easily deface their own character, nor render their purposes indistinct.

Always say a kind word if you can, if only that it may come in, perhaps, with singular opportuneness, entering some mournful man's darkened room, like a beautiful firefly, whose happy circumvolutions he cannot but watch, forgetting his many troubles.

The man who could withstand, with his fellow-men in single line, a charge of cavalry may lose all command of himself on the occurrence of a fire in his own house, because of some homely reminiscence unknown to the observing bystander.

What a blessing this smoking is! Perhaps the greatest that we owe to the discovery of America.