We give our best affections to the beautiful, only our second best to the useful.

A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.

At the best, sarcasms, bitter irony, scathing wit, are a sort of swordplay of the mind. You pink your adversary, and he is forthwith dead; and then you deserve to be hung for it.

There are some weaknesses that are peculiar and distinctive to generous characters, as freckles are to a fair skin.

The knowledge beyond all other knowledge is the knowledge how to excuse.

Intellectually, as politically, the direction of all true progress is towards greater freedom, and along an endless succession of ideas.

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.