As a rule, he fights well who has wrongs to redress; but vastly better fights he who, with wrongs as a spur, has also steadily before him a glorious result in prospect--a result in which he can discern balm for wounds, compensation for valor, remembrance and gratitude in the event of death.

A man is never so on trial as in the moment of excessive good fortune.

Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away,but love stays with us. Love is God.

Would you hurt a woman worst, aim at her affections.

A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his field of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer time.

I know what I should love to do - to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing - one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.

This soldiering thing sadly deadens that very good thing, humanity.