Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.

Can anybody tell what sorrows are locked up with our best affections, or what pain may be associated with every pleasure?

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first. Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.

One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.

Get your evidences of grace by pressing forward to the mark, and not by groping with a lantern after the boundary lines.

Love needs new leaves every summer of life, as much as your elm-tree, and new branches to grow broader and wider, and new flowers to cover the ground.

Care and labor are as much correlated to human existence as shadow is to light.