A true teacher should penetrate to whatever is vital in his pupil, and develop that by the light and heat of his own intelligence.

God is glorified, not by our groans, but our thanksgivings; and all good thought and good action claim a natural alliance with good cheer.

Pretension is nothing; power is everything.

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

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.

A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.

What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.