The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

Resolve will melt no rocks. But it can scale them.

The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.

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.

... 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.

What moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.

Don't seem to he on the lookout for crows, else you'll set other people watching.