“Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side.”

“Raillery is more insupportable than wrong; because we have a right to resent injuries, but are ridiculous in being angry at a jest.”

“People are more slanderous from vanity than from malice.”

“We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation.”

“We often act treacherously more from weakness than from a fixed motive.”

“What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.”

“It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.”

“There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except it be the progress of the characterwhich draws them.”