The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.

Endurance is the crowning quality.

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.

When I was a beggarly boy, And lived in a cellar damp, I had not a friend nor a toy, But I had Aladdin's lamp.

Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.

A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated.