Friends should be very delicate and careful in administering pity as medicine, when enemies use the same article as poison.

Those who, from the desire of our perfection, have the keenest eye far our faults generally compensate for it by taking a higher view of our merits than we deserve.

Where we find echoes, we generally find emptiness and hollowness; it is the contrary with the echoes of the heart.

Sombre thoughts and fancies often require a little real soil or substance to flourish in; they are the dark pine-trees which take root in, and frown over the rifts of the scathed and petrified heart, and are chiefly nourished by the rain of unavailing tears, and the vapors of fancy.

Where there is much general deformity nature has often, perhaps generally, accorded some one bodily grace even in over-measure. So, no doubt, with the intellect and disposition, only it is frequently less apparent, and we give ourselves but little trouble to discover it.

There is scarcely a man who is not conscious of the benefits which his own mind has received from the performance of single acts of benevolence. How strange that so few of us try a course of the same medicine!

It would be a great advantage to some schoolmasters if they would steal two hours a day from their pupils and give their own minds the benefit of the robbery.