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.

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

A thought embodied and embrained in fit words walks the earth a living being.

Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.

Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence, more than talents and accomplishments.

The eye observes only what the mind, the heart, and the imagination are gifted to see; and sight must be reinforced by insight before souls can be discerned as well as manners, ideas as well as objects, realities and relations as well as appearances and accidental connections.

Pretension is nothing; power is everything.