It is generally understood that men don't aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world.

I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people's glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone.

...the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.

The beautiful must ever rest in the arms of the sublime. The gentle needs the strong to sustain it, as much as the rock-flowers need rocks to grow on, or the ivy the rugged wall which it embraces.

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

Cathedrals do not seem to me to have been built. They seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt.

A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; while we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell. We live a while in Boston, and then a while in New York, and then, perhaps, turn up at Cincinnati. Scarcely any body with us is living where they expect to live and die. The man that dies in the house he was born in is a wonder. There is something pleasant in the permanence and repose of the English family estate, which we, in America, know very little of.