A thought must tell at once, or not at all.

As is our confidence, so is our capacity.

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can.

I maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding between people of education and without it - between those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power.

Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.

He who is as faithful to his principles as he is to himself is the true partisan.