Sometimes we have to change the truth in order to remember it.

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.