Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed.

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.

No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his neighbors.

All birds during the pairing season become more or less sentimental, and murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike the grinding-organ repetition and loudness of their habitual song. The crow is very comical as a lover; and to hear him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint-Preux standard has something the effect of a Mississippi boatman quoting Tennyson.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.

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.