Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

We have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.

Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.

Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.