To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obsc...
A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.
Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do (a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder), in a rough outside coat, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve o...
Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.
Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle.
Moonlight is sculpture.
It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the...
Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.
She has lived and loved! There is no folded petal, no latent dewdrop, in this perfectly developed rose!
The sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart... converted it into a tomb.
I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.
Life is made up of marble and mud.
Sunlight is painting.
Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may...
Pleasant is a rainy winter's day, within doors! The best study for such a day, or the best amusement,—call it which you will,—is a book of travels, describing scenes the most unlike that sombre one
The horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!
It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; ea...
A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.
A stale article, if you dip it in a good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you've scowled upon.
There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.