Patience is the support of weakness; impatience the ruin of strength.

It is not until we have passed through the furnace that we are made to know how much dross there is in our composition.

Time is the measurer of all things, but is itself immeasurable, and the grand discloser of all things, but is itself undisclosed.

The greatest miracle that the Almighty could perform would be to make a bad man happy, even in heaven; he must unparadise that blessed place to accomplish it. In its primary signification, all vice--that is, all excess--brings its own punishment even here.

It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and no very arduous task to astonish them.

All the poets are indebted more or less to those who have gone before them; even Homer's originality has been questioned, and Virgil owes almost as much to Theocritus, in his Pastorals, as to Homer, in his Heroics; and if our own countryman, Milton, has soared above both Homer and Virgil, it is because he has stolen some feathers from their wings.

The victim to too severe a law is considered as a martyr rather than a criminal.