The true ideal is not opposed to the real but lies in it; and blessed are the eyes that find it.

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.

Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave.

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking.

We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage.

We look at death through the cheap-glazed windows of the flesh, and believe him the monster which the flawed and cracked glass represents him.