In most old communities there is a common sense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity.

Pretension is nothing; power is everything.

Sin, every day, takes out a patent for some new invention.

A man of letters is often a man with two natures,--one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly.

God, in His wrath, has not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all arguments are happily transitory in their effect when they contradict the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the heart.

The greatness of action includes immoral as well as moral greatness--Cortes and Napoleon, as well as Luther and Washington.

Whenever you find humour, you find pathos close by its side.