In the mouths of many men soft words are like roses that soldiers put into the muzzles of their muskets on holidays.

Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead.

Thus thought I, as by night I read Of the great army of the dead, The trenches cold and damp, The starved and frozen camp,-- The wounded from the battle-plain, In dreary hospitals of pain, The cheerless corridors, The cold and stony floors. Lo! in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom And flit from room to room. And slow, as in a dream of bliss, The speechless sufferer turns to kiss Her shadow, as it falls Upon the darkening walls.

Every man has a paradise around him till he sins, and the angel of an accusing conscience drives him from his Eden.

Life hath quicksands, Life hath snares!

We waste our best years in distilling the sweetest flowers of life into potions which, after all, do not immortalize, but only intoxicate.

An enlightened mind is not hoodwinked; it is not shut up in a gloomy prison till it thinks the walls of its dungeon the limits of the universe, and the reach of its own chain the outer verge of intelligence.