A life is only a life. It is what we all have to pay one day or another. Is life less loathsome because one learns to laugh at it as well as hate it? A just man will keep his promise; a generous man will go beyond it. No change of condition can alter the sentiments of a generous heart.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is the depth of generosity. Money is the locomotive power if all things. Let us not imagine evils which we do not feel, nor injure life by misrepresentation. Fancy grows first imperious and, in time, despotic.

Then fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture or anguish. He who has nothing external that can divert him must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not, for who is pleased with what he is?

Partial mortals take their measures of right and wrong from what they find themselves to be, and cannot help being. So awkwardness is a person in the awkward. The power of doing anything with quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.

There is no moral truth, the weight of which can be felt without experience. Your imaginations can surpass wonders of art, but those of nature leave all imagination far behind.

Gentlemen  of an unpracticed imaginative capacity cannot vision for themselves exactly what they would, being unable to exercise authority over the proportions and the hues of the objects they conceive, which are very much at the mercy of their sportive caprices.

Gloomy dismal fancies, the usual companion of solitary bachelors, but it has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil, I think the love of man is the root of all evil.

The want for money is not as painful as the desire for love. A real passion is too might for words. It is the proud consciousness of certain qualities that cannot reveal to the everyday World that gives to genius that shy, and reserved, and troubled air, which puzzles and flatters you when you encounter it.

It is astonishing how large a hole a woodpecker makes with so small a beak: it is owing to successive impressions. A newspaper that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by parsing anything. Eulogy is invariably dull.

There will always be something worth living for while there are shimmery afternoons. This thing we call existence; is it not a something which has its roots far down below in the dark, and its branches stretching out into the immensity above, which we among the clouds cannot see? Not a chance jumble; a living thing, a One.

The thought gives us intense satisfaction, we cannot tell why—death is nothing more than a self-interest and fortune’s change are every day, breaking up many a happy group, and scattering them far and wide; and the boys and girls never come back again. And love seems to be lost.

There is a subtlety of perception in real attachment. Ryan says he hit the floor and was unable to move, as he left his highest intellect behind, he felt as if the roots of his heart had been ripped apart. Here the parable ends, as all parables end—incomplete, disappointing; even when it is borne towards man by one of the humans.

He is a saint, and persecution is all that he requires to bring out the standard of perfection that bringeth rather a liking and make him perfect.

Noble minds emulative of perfection may be allowed a little generous envy. Randolph has God and men interested in his cause. Poetry and romance ought to be an imitation of real life. If we do not exert it, what signifies power?

All the great books in the World are but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied images in the soul. The great impediments to knowledge are, first, the want of a common language; and next the short duration of existence.

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetimes. Mankind are not reasoning beings, if reason will not do with them. Deviation from common rules, when they proceed from genius, are not merely pardonable, but admirable.

Poetry is not dead, nor genius lost; nor has Mammon gained power over either, to bind or slay: they will both assert their existence, their presence, their liberty and strength. Powerful angels, safe in Heaven! They smile when sordid hearts triumph, and feeble ones weep over their destruction.

You must not forsake the ship in a tempest, because you cannot rule and keep down the winds. Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance. No civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever known what a please is. Poems are wanted to complete the poet.

A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood. Life is not a donkey race in which everyone is to ride his neighbor’s donkey and the last is to win.

It takes people along time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women. Outrage upon outrage they have endured, and that deadens—or rather makes their heroism unscrupulous. Historians are not happy in their flights of fancy.

They display imagination without raising interest. In every bone, there is a marrow, and beneath every jacket lives an angel. Oh God! That man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through!

The true picture of life is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed, to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder.

Felicitate thyself then upon the defects; which are evidently thy principal perfection; and which occasion thee a distinction which otherwise thou wouldest never have.

Power is ever dangerous and intoxicating. Human nature cannot bare it. It must be constantly checked, controlled and limited, or it declines inevitably into tyranny. The immense volumes of Eternity.