I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

One of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.

When we do not know a person - and also when we do - we have to judge his size by the size and nature of his achievements, as compared with the achievements of others in his special line of business - there is no other way.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.

In religion and politics, people's belief's and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination

I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.