The very large, very respectable, and very knowing class of misanthropes who rejoice in the name of grumblers,--persons who are so sure that the world is going to ruin, that they resent every attempt to comfort them as an insult to their sagacity, and accordingly seek their chief consolation in being inconsolable, their chief pleasure in being displeased.

Of the three prerequisites of genius; the first is soul; the second is soul; and the third is soul.

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

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

Everybody knows that fanaticism is religion caricatured; bears, indeed, about the same relation to it that a monkey bears to a man; yet, with many, contempt of fanaticism is received as a sure sign of hostility to religion.

Nothing really succeeds which is not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful. In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the State, pretension is nothing and power is everything.

Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic and he true, by whose light it surveys and shape s their opposites. It is a humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequities of existence, prompting tolerant views of life, bridging over the space which separates the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble.