Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enought to feel misery.
My eyes make pictures when they are shut.
Oh sleep It is a gentle thing Beloved from pole to pole.
To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.
All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.
I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.
Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.
He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.
A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.
Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.
The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.
A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation; but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.
Good and bad men are less than they seem.
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.
No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.
The happiness of life is made up of the little charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment.
The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.
People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.
All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed His sacred flame.
The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are one, Security to possessors; two, facility to acquirers; and three, hope to all.
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.
How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.
General principles... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves.
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.
Our own heart, and not other men's opinions, forms our true honor.
To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake - Aye, what then?
A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.
Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.
What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
