the delicacy that respects a friend's silence is one of the charms of life.

Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.

The longest way must have its close - the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.

Sublime is the dominion of the mind over the body, that, for a time, can make flesh and nerve impregnable, and string the sinews like steel, so that the weak become so mighty!

The ship, built on one element, but designed to have its life in another, seemed an image of the soul, formed and fashioned with many a weary hammer-stroke in this life, but finding its true element only when it sails out into the ocean of eternity.

Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.

the temperaments of children are often as oddly unsuited to parents as if capricious fairies had been filling cradles with changelings.