To say that God has given a man many and great talents frequently means that he has brought his heavens down within reach of his hands.

If ever I did a man any goodof course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil which I am constantly doing by being what I am.

The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.

The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers.

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen.