The best evidence of merit is a cordial recognition of it whenever and wherever it may be found.

The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.

As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.

Nature has provided for the exigency of privation, by putting the measure of our necessities far below the measure of our wants. Our necessities are to our wants as Falstaff's pennyworth of bread to his any quantity of sack.

Earth took her shining station as a star, In Heaven's dark hall, high up the crowd of worlds.

Fortune, like a coy mistress, loves to yield her favors, though she makes us wrest them from her.

The language of the heart--the language which "comes from the heart" and "goes to the heart"--is always simple, always graceful, and always full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language--difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied.