The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Might, could, would --they are contemptible auxiliaries.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change --only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans --which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.