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

When a person is down in the world, an ounce of help is better than a pound of preaching.

He that fancies himself very enlightened, because he sees the deficiencies of others, may be very ignorant, because he has not studied his own.

It is destiny phrase of the weak human heart! 'It is destiny' dark apology for every error! The strong and virtuous admit no destiny

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.

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.

To dispense with ceremony is the most delicate mode of conferring a compliment.