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.

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

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

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.

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

We vivisect the nightingale to probe the secret of his note.

They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.

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 dangerous it is.

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.