Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes.

When you borrow on your character, it is your character that you leave in pawn.

Self-confidence is not hope; it is the self-judgment of your own internal forces in their relation to the world without, which results from the failure of many hopes and the non-realization of many fears.

There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth.

Beside one deed of guilt, how blest is guiltless woe!

Two lives that once part are as ships that divide.

Poets alone are sure of immortality; they are the truest diviners of nature.