We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness.

Practical life teaches us that people may differ and that both may be wrong: it also teaches us that people may differ and both be right. Anchor yourself fast in the latter faith, or the former will sweep your heart away.

Every wise man lives in an observatory.

There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop.

Light, when suddenly let in, dazzles and hurts and almost blinds us: but this soon passes away, and it seems to become the only element we can exist in.

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life. Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.

A lawyer's brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.