One wellcultivated talent, deepened and enlarged, is worth 100 shallow faculties. The first law of success in this day, when so many things are clamoring for attention, is concentration-to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right nor to the left.

The countenance may be rightly defined as the title page which heralds the contents of the human volume, but like other title pages, it sometimes puzzles, often misleads, and often says nothing to the purpose.

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

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

It is not, of course, the subject that is or isn't dull, but the quality of attention that we do or do not pay to it. Dull subjects are those we have failed.

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.