The power of music that poetry lacks is the ability to persuade without argument.

The same disappointments in life will chasten and refine one man's spirit, embitter another's.

The easiest way for me to lose interests is to know too much of what I want to say before I begin.

The petty cares, the minute anxieties, the infinite littles which go to make up the sum of human experience, like the invisible granules of powder, give the last and highest polish to a character.

We all have two childhoods, the unhappy one and the happy one.

Intercourse is after all man's best teacher. "Know thyself" is an excellent maxim; but even self-knowledge cannot be perfected in closets and cloisters--nor amid lake scenery, and on the sunny side of the mountains. Men who seldom mix with their fellow-creatures are almost sure to be one-sided--the victims of fixed ideas, that sometimes lead to insanity.

What lasting progress was ever made in social reformation, except when every step was insured by appeals to the understanding and the will?