There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind.

Beauty hath no true glass, except it be in the sweet privacy of loving eyes.

No mud can soil us but the mud we throw.

May is a pious fraud of the almanac.

Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

Not what we give, but what we share, for the gift without the giver is bare.