It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains.

What men want is not talent, it is purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve, but the will to labor.

The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors.

Only by the candle, held in the skeleton hand of Poverty, can man read his own dark heart.

Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love.

Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of strength.

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.