It is a good rule never to see or talk to the man whose words have wrung your heart, or helped it, just as it is wise not to look down too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes shines on your path on a summer night, if you would not see the ugly worm below.

No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.

Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.

You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do.

For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread.

... I suppose that the party or sect which is to do any work in the world must breathe its own peculiar atmosphere, speak its own little patois, and see but one side of the question on which it fights.