In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions.

A day is a miniature eternity.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in company, cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion; all his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation occasions for the introduction of what he has to say. The favorites of society are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the company, contended and contenting.