Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.
Men, I still think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value.
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.
No man does anything from a single motive.
What comes from the heart goes to the heart.
He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
Fear gives sudden instincts of skill.
People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.
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.
What begins in fear usually ends in folly.
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.
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.
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
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.
Facts are not truths they are not conclusions they are not even premisses but in the nature and parts of premisses.
To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship which illumine only the track it has passed.
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.
Language is the armoury of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
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.