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.

Weakness ineffectually seeks to disguise itself,--like a drunken man trying to show how sober he is.

Winter is the night of vegetation.

Every trait of beauty may be referred to some virtue, as to innocence, candor, generosity, modesty, or heroism. St. Pierre To cultivate the sense of the beautiful, is one of the most effectual ways of cultivating an appreciation of the divine goodness.

Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was a business; but now, when great fortunes are only made by business, business is war.

Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong; he has a thousand who has overcome it.

It is safer to quote what is written than what is spoken. What a man writes it is fair to presume he believes as a matter of general conviction, but it is not so with what he utters in the freedom of conversation. In that he may only express the feeling of the moment, and not his settled judgment, or matured opinion.