There are some human beings born, so reared, so guided from a soft cradle to a calm and late grave, that no excessive suffering penetrates their lot, and no tempestuous blackness overcasts their journey. And often these are not pampered, selfish begins, but Nature’s elect, harmonious and benign; men and women mild with charity, kind agents of God’s kind attributes.

One would think that, as since the beginning of the World almost, the tide of emigration has been setting west, the needle would point that way; whereas, it is forever pointing its fixed forefinger toward the Pole, where there are few inducements to attract a sailor unless it be plenty of ice for mint-juleps. Mortal men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner.

Distress heightens devotion, which in prosperity is apt to grow languid. There was never a man so strong as to choose the dream when Reality cast off her shackles and beckoned. Imagination we regard as a compensation, not as the supreme gift. Good fortune is never more doubtful than when it wears the sweetest and most promising countenance.

He who reduces all beneath him to state of servitude becomes himself the slave of his establishment, and of all his domestics. In some cases of drunkenness, and in others of  animal magnetism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash, each of which pursues its separate course as through it were continuous instead of broke. Thus, if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where.

Those who have the charge of youth should watch the first attempts f dawning reason, and fix, in their youthful hearts, such sentiments of truth and honor as might defy the hand of time to efface. Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

Fear plucks the feathers from the wings of the heart and sits it naked and shivering in a vault, where the passing of a common hodman’s foot above sounds like the king of terrors coming. Fear transfers the creatures of the World and the craft of man, making that which is ugly seemly in our eyes, ad that which is beautiful, unsightly.  Whom we fear more than love, we are not far from hating.

A man must earn his freedom daily, or he will become a slave in some form or another: and the way to earn it is by work and obedience to right direction. When acknowledged, love authorizes freedom; and freedom begets freedom. The triumph of a person’s intellect, the proof of his power, is to make the serpent who inhabits us fight against himself, till he is destroyed.

If the human mind is not actively good, it will generally be actively evil. There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the real love and truth—in the end, stronger than any evil or misfortune. A true hearted lover forgets all trespasses, and a smile cureth the wounding of a frown.

One likes to be done well by every tense, past, present, and future. I acted as if there was no such thing as any kind love but that which tended to matrimony. Could time be reversed, and the future change places with the past, the past would cry out against us, and our future, full as loudly, as we against the ages forgone. All the Ages are his children, calling each other names. We have a rich or a barren future, just as we conceive it.