Fire is the most tolerable third party

Show me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and let me hear what noble verse he can repeat. He'll be as dumb as if his lips were stone.

The life without men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

To forget all about your mistakes adds to them perhaps.

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

Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?

Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light.