Character shows itself apart from genius as a special thing. The first point of measurement of any man is that of quality.

The first wild-flower of the year is like land after sea.

To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!

Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges.

Do not waste a minute - not a second - in trying to demonstrate to others the merits of your performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it.

What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?

How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls,--a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one's children rich.

There is certainly no defence or water -proof garment against adverse fortune which is, on the whole, so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.

The most fertile soil does not necessarily produce the most abundant harvest. It is the use we make of our faculties which renders them valuable.

We are in this fairyland on sufferance

His eyes made a slow scan of my closet doors, which were cracked. "I thought I heard something.""Yeah, well, guess what? I’m a living, breathing person, and every now and then I make noise!

Sometimes, the indefinite article 'an' seems unnecessary to me. We can use 'a' instead of 'an'. It will not create a huge problem if we write or say 'a ant', not 'an ant'!

Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.

The action comes at us through a buzz of nattering remarks.

Facts speak louder than statistics.

Something that is very difficult to translate is the humor.

CAIR officials or former officials have been arrested on charges related to terrorism yet all it offers is silence and stonewalling in discussing what are its real motives.

No-one wants to see violence of any kind on our streets, certainly not any violence that's justified by extreme nationalist ideas or that targets people because of their religion.

I can't remember what my first script was.