One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma.

Mother of Marvels, mysterious and tender Nature, why do we not live more in thee.

There is no respect for others without humility in one's self.

The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.

Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope that springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil.

The great majority of men are but tangled skeins, imperfect keyboards, so many specimens of restless or stagnant chaos--and what makes their situation almost hopeless is the fact that they take pleasure in it. There is no curing a sick man who believes himself in health.

The germs of all things are in every heart, and the greatest criminals as well as the greatest heroes are but different modes of ourselves.