Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.

Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.

Education was almost entirely a matter of luck — usually of ill-luck — in those distant days.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

Things are achieved when they are well begun.