You may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It will alone gentilize, if unmixed with cant; and I know nothing else that will, alone. Certainly not the army, which is thought to be the grand embellisher of manners.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.

We should manage our thoughts as shepherds do their flowers in making a garland: first, select the choicest, and then dispose them in the most proper places, that every one may reflect a part of its color and brightness on the next.

My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the Volition, and not of the intellectual faculties.

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.

What is one man's gain is another's loss.