The present is an edifice which God cannot rebuild.

The exceptional life depends not on working harder, but on different, even opposite, actions from habit and the crowd.

Among provocative, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?

There is no country in which so absolute a homage is paid to wealth. In America there is a touch of shame when a man exhibits theevidences of large property, as if after all it needed apology. But the Englishman has pure pride in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. A coarse logic rules throughout all English souls: if you have merit, can you not show it by your good clothes and coach and horses?

To the young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem.