[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.

O reputation! dearer far than life.

Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.

Idleness induces caprice.

It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.