The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.

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

A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.

The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.

For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

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

Simplicity in character, in manners, in style; in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity.

Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose.

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.

When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.

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

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.

Love keeps the cold out better than a cloak.

Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.

Talk not of wasted affection - affection never was wasted.

All things must change to something new, to something strange.

Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.

Resolve and thou art free.

He that respects himself is safe from others. He wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.

Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.

Build today, then strong and sure, With a firm and ample base; And ascending and secure. Shall tomorrow find its place.

They who go Feel not the pain of parting; it is they Who stay behind that suffer.

Music is the universal language of mankind.

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

The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do without thought of fame. If it comes at all it will come because it is deserved, not because it is sought after.

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

Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.

In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.

Method is more important than strength, when you wish to control your enemies. By dropping golden beads near a snake, a crow once managed To have a passer-by kill the snake for the beads.

The human voice is the organ of the soul.

There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.

The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art.

Man is always more than he can know of himself; consequently, his accomplishments, time and again, will come as a surprise to him.

The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain.

It is foolish to pretend that one is fully recovered from a disappointed passion. Such wounds always leave a scar.

The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.

In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.

Give what you have to somebody, it may be better than you think.

Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.

The nearer the dawn the darker the night.

Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.