When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it..

I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election..

Light, when suddenly let in, dazzles and hurts and almost blinds us: but this soon passes away, and it seems to become the only element we can exist ….

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a….

Just, harmonious, temperate as is the spirit of liberty, there is in the name and mere notion of it a vagueness so opposite to the definite clearness….

A youth's love is the more passionate; virgin love is the more idolatrous..

It is said that Windham, when he came to the end of a speech, often found himself so perplexed by his own subtlety that he hardly knew which way he w….

Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and exp….

I bid you conquer in your warfare against your four great enemies, the world, the devil, the flesh, and above all, that obstinate and perverse self-w….

Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources,--one pure, the other impure..

What do our clergy lose by reading their sermons? They lose preaching, the preaching of the voice in many cases, the preaching of the eye almost alwa….

Some minds are made of blotting-paper: you can write nothing on them distinctly. They swallow the ink, and you find a large spot..

We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness..

Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof..

Many a man's vices have at first been nothing worse than good qualities run wild..

How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world..

If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dra….

The grand difficulty is to feel the reality of both worlds, so as to give each its due place in our thoughts and feelings, to keep our mind's eye and….

Friendship is Love with jewels on, but without either flowers or veil..

Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love..

The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be ….