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.

The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, and still fluttered down the snow.

He gives only the worthless gold who gives from a sense of duty.

To make the common marvelous is the test of genius.

Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.

The nunneries of silent nooks, the murmured longing of the wood.

There is a law of neutralization of forces, which hinders bodies from sinking beyond a certain depth in the sea; but in the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.