Good wine needs neither bush nor preface to make it welcome. And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd.

The willow which bends to the tempest often escapes better than the oak which resists it.

For a laggard in love, and a dastard in war, Was to wed the fair Ellen of Lochinvar.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

He that would soothe sorrow must not argue on the vanity of the most deceitful hopes.

The misery of keeping a dog is his dying so soon. But, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of me?

The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention... It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.