The very dogs that sullenly bay the moon from farm-yards in these nights excite more heroism in our breasts than all the civil exhortations or war sermons of the age.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. [So why not suspect good rather than bad in events, people and life and thereby find it more?]

As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.

Where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed themselves there?

As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis.