Blows are sarcasms turned stupid.

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.

You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.

I have a knack of hoping, which is as good as an estate.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.

I know forgiveness is a man's duty, but, to my thinking, that can only mean as you're to give up all thoughts o' taking revenge: it can never mean as you're t' have your old feelings back again, for that's not possible.