Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

Who can . . . guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds. The great man knew not that he was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did, he did because he must; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the circumstances of the moment.

There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.

The highest Beauty should be plain set.

The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.