I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather.

Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles; but the magnifying of the one is like looking through a telescope at heavenly objects; that of the other, like enlarging monsters with a microscope.

There are two worlds: The world that we can measure with line and rule, and the world we feel with our hearts and imaginations.

When moral courage feels that it is in the right, there is no personal daring of which it is incapable.

We lose in depth of expression when we go to inferior animals for comparisons with human beauty. Homer calls Juno ox-eyed; and the epithet suits well with the eyes of that goddess, because she may be supposed, with all her beauty, to want a certain humanity. Her large eyes look at you with a royal indifference.

Words are often things also, and very precious, especially on the gravest occasions. Without "words," and the truth of things that is in them, what were we?

Those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child. Their other children grow up to manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality; but this one alone is rendered an immortal child; for death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence.