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

The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the commonsense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit.

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.

The inborn geniality of some people amounts to genius.

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

The purity of the critical ermine, like that of the judicial, is often soiled by contact with politics.