The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool the truest heroism is to resist the doubt and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.

• Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
• Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.
• We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream it may be so the moment after death.
• The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing second, the gratification of one's family and friends and lastly, the solid cash.
• Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
• Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
• Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
• Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
• The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
• It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.