“But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,–cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.”

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Any one prominent in affairs can always see when a man may steal a horse and when a man may not look over a hedge.

Nothing surely is as potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water drop that hollows the stone.

It is a grand thing to rise in the world. The ambition to do so is the very salt of the earth. It is the parent of all enterprise, and the cause of all improvement.

Those who have courage to love should have courage to suffer.

I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover’s mind if she knew the whole of it.

Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.

It is very hard, that necessity of listening to a man who says nothing

Many people talk much, and then very many people talk very much more.

No other American city is so intensely American as New York.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

Speeches easy to young speakers are generally very difficult to old listeners.

It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.

Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.