The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one's main purpose to serve a job here and there.

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours after the unattainable.

I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the pot-luck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room.