Every man who observes vigilantly, and resolves steadfastly, grows unconsciously into genius.

The heart of a girl is like a convent--the holier the cloister, the more charitable the door.

Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature -- it makes the proud man meek -- the cheerful, sad -- the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy fail before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.

Ah, what without a heaven would be even love!--a perpetual terror of the separation that must one day come.

The prudent person may direct a state, but it is the enthusiast who regenerates or ruins it

Emulation, even in brutes, is sensitively "nervous." See the tremor of the thoroughbred racer before he starts. The dray-horse does not tremble, but he does not emulate. It is not his work to run a race. Says Marcus Antoninus, "It is all one to a stone whether it be thrown upward or downward." Yet the emulation of a man of genius is seldom with his contemporaries, that is, inwardly in his mind, although outwardly in his act it would seem so. The competitors with whom his secret ambition seems to vie are the dead.

Sharp is the kiss of the falcon's beak.