Even when we fancy we have grown wiser, it is only, it may be, that new prejudices have displaced old ones.

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.

How like a railway tunnel is the poor man's life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!

Most books fail, not so much from a want of ability in their authors, as from an absence in their productions of a thorough development of their ability.

The beauty seen is partly in him who sees it. [a predisposition to notice the beautiful, in everything.]

Men, like musical instruments, seem made to be played upon.

God has created too few unmixed evils to warrant the belief that death is one of them. In all things else in nature, goodness so abounds that we are authorized to infer that it does not stop even at the grave. It is only that her footprints have become invisible.