The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly

The fanatic has the courage of his conviction and the intolerance of his courage. He is opposed to the death penalty for murder, but he would willingly have anyone electrocuted who disagreed with him on the subject

O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!

Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy

Turn on its noiseless hinges, delicate sleep!

The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing

True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation

That was indeed to live – at one bold swoop to wrest from darkling death the best that death to life can give

My father invested his money so securely in the banking business that he was never able to get any of it out again

So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane

At the beginning of the twentieth century barbarism can throw off its gentle disguise, and burn a man at the stake as complacently as in the Middle Ages

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs – putting in his oar, so to speak – with some pat word or sentence

The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a false sorrow

The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises have been checked and what fine souls have been blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will never know

It is the Lord’s Day, and I do believe that cheerful hearts and faces are not unpleasant in His sight

The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born

All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do sowould I?

No bird has ever uttered note That was not in some first bird’s throat; Since Eden’s freshness and man’s fall No rose has been original

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care for anything properly said

Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth

Gracious to all, to none subservient, Without offense he spoke the word he meant

When friends are at your hearthside met, Sweet courtesy has done its most If you have made each guest forget That he himself is not the host

Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

Up from the dark the moon begins to creep; and now a pallid, haggard face lifts she above the water-line: thus from the deep a drowned body rises solemnly

After a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow

The fate of the worm refutes the pretended ethical teaching of the proverb, which assumes to illustrate the advantage of early rising and does so by showing how extremely dangerous it is.

What probing deep Has ever solved the mystery of sleep?

It is only your habitual late riser who takes in the full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when he gets up to go afishing. He brings virginal emotions and unsatiated eyes to the sparkling freshness of earth and stream and sky

This one sits shivering in Fortune’s smile, taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath. This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while laughs in the teeth of Death

It were better to be a soldier’s widow than a coward’s wife

But I, in the chilling twilight stand and wait At the portcullis, at thy castle gate, Longing to see the charmed door of dreams Turn on its noiseless hinges, delicate sleep

Civilization is the lamb’s skin in which barbarism masquerades

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks

I like not lady-slippers, Nor yet the sweet-pea blossoms, Nor yet the flaky roses, Red or white as snow; I like the chaliced lilies, The heavy Eastern lilies, The gorgeous tiger-lilies, That in our garden grow.

The ocean moans over dead men’s bones

Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows in yonder West; the fair, frail palaces, The fading Alps and archipelagoes and great cloud continents of sunset-seas

So precious life is! Even to the old, the hours are as a miser’s coins

How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf

O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well to leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast fold Sorrow’s children, soothe the hurts of Fate, lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel stay those who to thy sacred portals come to waste the gifts of Freedom

The ability to have our own way, and at the same time convince others they are having their own way, is a rare thing among men. Among women it is as common as eyebrows

Everyone has a bookplate these days, and the collectors are after it. The fool and his bookplate are soon parted. To distribute one’s ex libris is inanely to destroy the only significance it has, that of indicating the past or present ownership of the volume in which it is placed

Night is a stealthy, evil Raven, Wrapt to the eyes in his black wings.

With the tears a Land hath shed. Their graves should ever be green

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice

What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air