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| A compliment is usually accompanied with a bow, as if to beg pardon for paying it. | 1 |
| A critic should be a pair of snuffers. He is oftener an extinguisher, and not seldom a thief. | 2 |
| Courage, when it is not heroic self-sacrifice, is sometimes a modification and sometimes a result of faith. | 3 |
| Curiosity is a little more than another name for hope. | 4 |
| Do you wish to find out a person’s weak points? Note the failings he has the quickest eye for in others. They may not be the very failings he is himself conscious of; but they will be their next door neighbors. No man keeps such a jealous lookout as a rival. | 5 |
| Everybody has his own theatre, in which he is manager, actor, prompter, playwright, sceneshifter, boxkeeper, doorkeeper, all in one, and audience into the bargain. | 6 |
| Few persons have courage enough to appear as good as they really are. | 7 |
| He mast be a thorough fool who can learn nothing from his own folly. | 8 |
| He who does evil that good may come, pays a toll to the devil to let him into heaven. | 9 |
| Heroism is active genius; genius, contemplative heroism. Heroism is the self-devotion of genius manifesting itself in action. | 10 |
| I have ever gained the most profit, and the most pleasure also, from the books which have made me think the most: and, when the difficulties have once been overcome, these are the books which have struck the deepest root, not only in my memory and understanding, but likewise in my affections. | 11 |
| In darkness there is no choice. It is light that enables us to see the differences between things; and it is Christ that gives us light. | 12 |
| Jealousy is said to be the offspring of love. Yet, unless the parent makes haste to strangle the child, the child will not rest till it has poisoned the parent. | 13 |
| Knowledge is the parent of love; wisdom, love itself. | 14 |
| Knowledge partakes of infinity; it widens with our capacities: the higher we mount in it, the vaster and more magnificent are the prospects it stretches out before us. | 15 |
| Languages are the barometers of national thought and character. | 16 |
| Many a man’s vices have at first been nothing worse than good qualities run wild. | 17 |
| Mountains never shake hands. Their roots may touch; they may keep together some way up; but at length they part company, and rise into individual, insulated peaks. So is it with great men. | 18 |
| Nobody who is afraid of laughing, and heartily too at his friend, can be said to have a true and thorough love for him; and, on the other hand, it would portray a sorry want of faith to distrust a friend because he laughs at you. Few men, I believe, are much worth loving in whom there is not something well worth laughing at. | 19 |
| Nothing in the world is lawless except a slave. | 20 |
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| Oratory may be symbolized by a warrior’s eye, flashing from under a philosopher’s brow. But why a warrior’s eye rather than a poet’s? Because in oratory the will must predominate. | 21 |
| Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry. | 22 |
| Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature. | 23 |
| Poverty breeds wealth; and wealth in its turn breeds poverty. The earth, to form the mould, is taken out of the ditch; and whatever may be the height of the one will be the depth of the other. | 24 |
| Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine, of honor. | 25 |
| Reviewers are forever telling authors they can’t understand them. The author might often reply: Is that my fault? | 26 |
| Science sees signs; poetry the thing signified. | 27 |
| Smiles are the language of love. | 28 |
| Some men treat the God of their fathers as they treat their father’s friend. They do not deny Him; by no means; they only deny themselves to Him, when He is good enough to call upon them. | 29 |
| Song is the tone of feeling. * * * If song, however, be the tone or feeling, what is beautiful singing? The balance of feeling, not the absence of it. | 30 |
| The ancients dreaded death: the Christian can only fear dying. | 31 |
| The craving for sympathy is the common boundary-line between joy and sorrow. | 32 |
| The first step to self-knowledge is self-distrust. Nor can we attain to any kind of knowledge, except by a like process. | 33 |
| The king is the least independent man in his dominions; the beggar the most so. | 34 |
| The mind is like a sheet of white paper in this, that the impressions it receives the oftenest, and retains the longest, are black ones. | 35 |
| The most mischievous liars are those who keep sliding on the verge of truth. | 36 |
| The only way of setting the will free is to deliver it from wilfulness. | 37 |
| To talk without effort is, after all, the great charm of talking. | 38 |
| To those whose god is honor, disgrace alone is sin. | 39 |
| Truth, when witty, is the wittiest of all things. | 40 |
| We never know the true value of friends. While they live we are too sensitive of their faults: when we have lost them we only see their virtues. | 41 |
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