There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things.

That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped.

It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.

Were this world an endless pain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage.

Let us only hate hatred; and once give love a play, we will fall in love with a unicorn.

He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married.

You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.