avarice is especially, I suppose, a disease of the imagination.

Puns are often unacceptable to the feelings; they come like a spoonful of ice-cream in the midst of a comfortable smoking-hot steak, or as a peppery morsel when your palate was in expectation of a mild pudding.

bubbles of false opinion will last whole ages, and deceive whole generations, till they are broken by some powerful breath, and even then how often they reunite, and again shine in the eyes of men, who hold them solid as cannon-balls!

Religious bigotry is a dull fire - hot enough to roast an ox, but with no lambent, luminous flame shooting up from it.

Life is the steam of the corporeal engine; the soul is the engineer who makes use of the steam-quickened engine.

February brings the rain, Thaws the frozen lake again.

Parents and children cannot be to each other, as husbands with wives and wives with husbands. Nature has separated them by an almost impassable barrier of time; the mind and the heart are in quite a different state at fifteen and forty.