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.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

The best travel is that which one can take by one's own fireside. In memory or imagination.

... we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.