It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.

Many men want wealth,--not a competence alone, but a live-story competence. Everything subserves this; and religion they would like as a sort of lightning-rod to their houses, to ward off by and by the bolts of Divine wrath.

Self-contemplation is apt to end in self-conceit.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

Not that which men do worthily, but that which they do successfully, is what history makes haste to record.

Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.

Well-married, a man is winged: ill-matched, he is shackled.