Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.

I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me

I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.

There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.

But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.