Nothing but the right can ever be expedient, since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a great good to a less.

It is quite possible, and not uncommon, to read most laboriously, even so as to get by heart the words of a book, without really studying it at all,--that is, without employing the thoughts on the subject.

It is folly to shiver over last year's snow.

Ethical maxims are bandied about as a sort of current coin of discourse, and, being never melted down for use, those that are of base metal are never detected.

Falsehood, like the dry-rot, flourishes the more in proportion as air and light are excluded.

Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man's devising.

The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it.