“Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.”

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

The nearer the dawn the darker the night.

It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.

The dawn is not distant, nor is the night starless; love is eternal.

If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.

Youth comes but once in a lifetime.

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it.

Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.

The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.

Evil is only good perverted.

Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.

It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.

Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.

Joy, temperance, and repose, slam the door on the doctor’s nose.

Into each life some rain must fall.

As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.