To judge human character rightly, a man may sometimes have very small experience, provided he has a very large heart.

The object of ambition, unlike that of love, never being wholly possessed, ambition is the more durable passion of the two.

My father died shortly after I was twenty-one; and being left well off, and having a taste for travel and adventure, I resigned, for a time, all pursuit of the almighty dollar, and became a desultory wanderer over the face of the earth.

A man's own conscience is his sole tribunal, and he should care no more for that phantom "opinion" than he should fear meeting a ghost if he crossed the churchyard at dark.

We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.

When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,--when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,--oh, then diet yourself well on biography,--the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it.

Whenever man commits a crime heaven finds a witness.