“The willow which bends to the tempest often escapes better than the oak which resists it.”

Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities.

Great talent has always a little madness mixed up with it.

Where is the coward that would not dare to fight for such a land as Scotland?

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

The happy combination of fortuitous circumstances.

Recollect that the Almighty, who gave the dog to be companion of our pleasures and our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and incapable of deceit.

A glass of good wine is a gracious creature, and reconciles poor mortality to itself and that is what few things can do.

Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!

Good Night, Goodnight, Dream.

Silence, maiden; thy tongue outruns thy discretion.

Blessed be his name, who hath appointed the quiet night to follow the busy day, and the calm sleep to refresh the wearied limbs and to compose the troubled spirit.

It is only when I dally with what I am about, look back and aside, instead of keeping my eyes straight forward, that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart.

All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.

Caution comes too late when we are in the midst of evils.

I have heard men talk about the blessings of freedom, he said to himself, but I wish any wise man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it.

The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention… It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.