Advice is like snow - the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
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.
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.
Love is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.
The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.
Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.
The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.
Talk of the devil, and his horns appear.
I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
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.
In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
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 the best order.
A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.
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 imagination than the memory.
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.
All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed His sacred flame.
What is a epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake - Aye, what then?
Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.
He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.
A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.
No one does anything from a single motive.
And though thou notest from thy safe recess old friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air love them for what they are; nor love them less, because to thee they are not what they were.
Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.
Good and bad men are less than they seem.
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.
Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor.
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.
General principles... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves.
All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.
Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.
Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.
Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.
The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.
The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
