The cross was two pieces of dead wood; and a helpless, unresisting Man was nailed to it; yet it was mightier than the world, and triumphed, and will ever triumph over it.

One saves oneself much pain, by taking pains; much trouble, by taking trouble.

I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election.

Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof.

Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.

Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical causes, some of the countries the most civilized in the day's of Augustus are now in a state of hopeless barbarism.

Some minds are made of blotting-paper: you can write nothing on them distinctly. They swallow the ink, and you find a large spot.