We are only what we are; not what we would be; nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.

There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual impartiality should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered be a cause not partisan.

In truth, a mature man who uses hair oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.

It is a thing which every sensible American should learn from every sensible Englishman, that glare and glitter, gimcracks and gewgaws, are not indispensable to domestic solacement.

So long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature.

For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.

Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.