I would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly.

If one waits for the right time to come before writing, the right time never comes.

Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people.

The very gnarliest and hardest of hearts has some musical strings in it; but they are tuned differently in every one of us.

Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one.

Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean.

Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.