The Italians have voices like peacocks - German gives me a cold in the head - and Russian is nothing but sneezing

Earnest men never think in vain, though their thoughts may be errors.

Every man of sound brain whom you meet knows something worth knowing better than yourself. A man, on the whole, is a better preceptor than a book. But what scholar does not allow that the dullest book can suggest to him a new and a sound idea?

Invention is nothing more than a fine deviation from, or enlargement on a fine model . . .

In how large a proportion of creatures is existence composed of one ruling passion, the most agonizing of all sensations--fear.

Of all the conditions to which the heart is subject suspense is one that most gnaws and cankers into the frame. One little month of that suspense, when it involves death, we are told by an eye witness in "Wakefield on the Punishment of Death," is sufficient to plough fixed lines and furrows in a convict of five and twenty,--sufficient, to dash the brown hair with grey, and to bleach the grey to white.

Kindness like light speaks in the air it gilds.