Friendship is a sheltering tree.
Men, I still think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value.
He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
Facts are not truths they are not conclusions they are not even premisses but in the nature and parts of premisses.
No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
Alas! they had been friends in youth but whispering tongues can poison truth.
Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
Sympathy constitutes friendship but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
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 their best order.
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,Which finds no natural outlet or relief,In word, or sigh, or tear.
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.
Language is the armoury of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
What comes from the heart goes to the heart.
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.
To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship which illumine only the track it has passed.
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.
Fear gives sudden instincts of skill.
Our own heart, and not other men's opinions, forms our true honor.
An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever I could not sing an air to save my life but I have the intensest delight in music and can detect good from bad.