The nearest approximation to an understanding of life is to feel it--to realize it to the full--to be a profound and inscrutable mystery.

A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric.

In the assurance of strength there is strength; and they are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their powers.

Hope is the best part of our riches. What sufficeth it that we have the wealth of the Indies in our pockets, if we have not the hope of heaven in our souls?

Luminous quotations, also, atone, by their interest, for the dulness of an inferior book, and add to the value of a superior work by the variety which they lend to its style and treatment.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

It may almost be held that the hope of commercial gain has done nearly as much for the cause of truth as even the love of truth.