The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.

A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.

There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

A felon could plead "benefit of clergy" and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the "neck verse", which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.

Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.