Every sentence is the result of a long probation.

Alas! this is the crying sin of the age, this want of faith in the prevalence of a man. Nothing can be effected but by one man. Hewho wants help wants everything. True, this is the condition of our weakness, but it can never be the means of our recovery. We must first succeed alone, that we may enjoy our success together.

Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

If you will not try, you will go to your grave with your song still inside you.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails - aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter's reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.