I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?

The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.

I appeal now to the convictions of the communicants, and ask such persons whether they have not been occasionally conscious of a painful confusion of thought between the worship due to God and the commemoration due to Christ.

Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend, Unnerves his strength, invites his end.