To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

I don't believe the Devil would give half as much for the services of a sinner as he would for those of one of these folks that are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make them unpleasing.

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep the real and the true.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words.

An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

Old people are a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details like so many microscopes, not exactly what human beings ought to be.