Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.

A genuine passion is like a mountain stream; it admits of no impediment; it cannot go backward; it must go forward.

Sensitiveness is closely allied to egotism; and excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness. The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.

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.

Love delights in paradoxes. Saddest when it has most reason to be gay, sighs are the signs of its deepest joy, and silence is the expression of its yearning tenderness.

Books are embalmed minds.

Complaint is. more contemptible than pitiful.