He whom God hath gifted with a love of retirement possesses, as it were, an extra sense.

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.

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.

The food of hope is meditative action.

Keep we to the broad truths before us; duty here; knowledge comes alone in the Hereafter.

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.

A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.