There is nothing so clear-sighted and sensible as a noble mind in a low estate.

When the cup of any sensual pleasure is drained to the bottom, there is always poison in the dregs.

Life is a warfare; and he who easily desponds deserts a double duty--he betrays the noblest property of man, which is dauntless resolution; and he rejects the providence of that All-Gracious Being who guides and rules the universe.

Love is full of imagination.

Any base heart can devise means of vileness, and affix the ugly shapings of its own fancy to the actions of those around him; but it requires loftiness of mind, and the heaven-born spirit of virtue, to imagine greatness where it is not, and to deck the sordid objects of nature in the beautiful robes of loveliness and light.

In his fairy dreams of war [Thaddeus] always made conquest the sure end of his battles.

Bright was the summer of 1296. The war which had desolated Scotland was then at an end.