Victories that come cheap are cheap. Those only are worth having which come as the result of hard fighting.

A door that seems to stand open must be of a man's size, or it is not the door that providence means for him.

There is an ugly kind of forgiveness in this world,--a kind of hedgehog forgiveness, shot out like quills. Men take one who has offended, and set him down before the blowpipe of their indignation, and scorch him, and burn his fault into him; and when they have kneaded him sufficiently with their fiery fists, then--they forgive him.

Thinking is creating with God, as thinking is writing with the ready writer; and worlds are only leaves turned over in the process of composition, about his throne.

Some people are so dry that you might soak them in a joke for a month and it would not get through their skins.

Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.

A law is valuable not because it is law, but because there is right in it.