As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.
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.
What comes from the heart goes to the heart.
What begins in fear usually ends in folly.
There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second is like the sponge, which imbi...
He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imaginat...
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.
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
No man does anything from a single motive.
The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are...
What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awake, you had the fl...
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves...
Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing did certain persons die before they sing.
So lonely 'twas that God himself scarce seemed there to be.
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions-the little soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile a kind look a heart-felt compliment and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and...
Our own heart, and not other men's opinions, forms our true honor.
Only the wise possess ideas the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.
He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.