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

The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.

Cheerfulness in most cheerful people is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.

Men educate each other in reason by contact or collision, and keep each other sane by the very conflict of their separate hobbies. Society as a whole is the deadly enemy of the particular crotchet of each, and solitude is almost the only condition in which the acorn of conceit can grow to the oak of perfect self-delusion.

Wit is an unexpected explosion of thought.

The great characteristic of men of active genius is a sublime self-confidence, springing not from self-conceit, but from an intense identification of the man with his object, which lifts him altogether above the fear of danger and death, which gives to his enterprise a character of insanity to the common eye, and which communicates an almost superhuman audacity to his will.

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