Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.

Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.

... learning to love any one is like an increase of property, -- it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.