Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.