Fear gives sudden instincts of skill.

We have no adequate conception of the perfection of the ancient tragic dance. The pleasure which the greeks received from it had for its basis difference; & the more unfit the vehicle, the more lively was the curiosity & intense the delights at seeing the difficulty overcome.

It would not be correct to say that every moral obligation involves a legal duty; but every legal duty is founded on a moral obligation.

We must not be guilty of taking the law into our own hands, and converting it from what it really is to what we think it ought to be.

What! Did Sir W[alter] R[aleigh] believe that a male and female ounce (and, if so, why not two tigers and lions, etc?) would have produced, in a course of generations, a cat, or a cat a lion? This is Darwinizing with a vengeance.

A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.