Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
Wherever there is excessive wealth, there is also in the train of it excessive poverty.
Life and death appear more certainly ours than whatsoever else; and yet hardly can that be called ours, which comes without our knowledge, and goes without it.
No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable.
Avoid, which many grave men have not done, words taken from sacred subjects and from elevated poetry: these we have seen vilely prostituted. Avoid too the society of the barbarians who misemploy them.
Be assured that, although men of eminent genius have been guilty of all other vices, none worthy of more than a secondary name has ever been a gamester. Either an excess of avarice or a deficiency of what, in physics, is called excitability, is the cause of it; neither of which can exist in the same bosom with genius, with patriotism, or with virtue.
Justice is often pale and melancholy; but Gratitude, her daughter, is constantly in the flow of spirits and the bloom of loveliness.
Immoderate power, like other intemperance, leaves the progeny weaker and weaker, until nature as in compassion covers it with her mantle and it is seen no more.
Many love music but for music's sake, Many because her touches can awake Thoughts that repose within the breast half-dead, And rise to follow where she loves to lead. What various feelings come from days gone by! What tears from far-off sources dim the eye! Few, when light fingers with sweet voices play, And melodies swell, pause, and melt away, Mind how at every touch, at every tone, A spark of life hath glistened and hath gone.
It is easy to look down on others; to look down on ourselves is the difficulty.
The happiest of pillows is not that which love first presses! it is that which death has frowned on and passed over.
It appears to be among the laws of nature, that the mighty of intellect should be pursued and carped by the little, as the solitary flight of one great bird is followed by the twittering petulance of many smaller.
The assailant is often in the right; that the assailed is always.
This is the pleasantest part of life. Oblivion throws her light coverlet over our infancy; and, soon after we are out of the cradle we forget how soundly we had been slumbering, and how delightful were our dreams. Toil and pleasure contend for us almost the instant we rise from it: and weariness follows whichever has carried us away. We stop awhile, look around us, wonder to find we have completed the circle of existence, fold our arms, and fall asleep again.
No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken, Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.
The present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.
Dignity, in private men and in governments, has been little else than a stately and stiff perseverance in oppression; and spirit, as it is called, little else than the foam of hard-mouthed insolence.
How delightful it is to see a friend after a length of absence! How delightful to chide him for that length of absence to which we owe such delight.
To my ninth decade I have totter'd on, And no soft arm bends now my steps to steady; She, who once led me where she would, is gone, So when he calls me, Death shall find me ready.
Political men, like goats, usually thrive best among inequalities.
Such is our impatience, such our hatred of procrastination, to everything but the amendment of our practices and the adornment of our nature, one would imagine we were dragging Time along by force, and not he us.
Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.
Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth.
He who brings ridicule to bear against truth finds in his hand a blade without a hilt. The most sparkling and pointed flame of wit flickers and expires against the incombustible walls of her sanctuary.
Cruelty in all countries is the companion of anger; but there is only one, and never was another on the globe, where she coquets both with anger and mirth.
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