Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?

What should I do—how should I act now, this very day . . . What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

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

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

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.