For what is history, but... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species.

There is something nobly simple and pure in a taste for the cultivation of forest trees.

A barking dog is often more useful than a sleeping lion.

Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters--who, like deer, goats and divers other graminivorous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of their verdure, and retarding their progress to maturity.

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them.

It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end.

Christmas is a season for kindling the fire for hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.