“What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery!”

“I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else... I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.”

“All publishers are Columbuses. The successful author is their America. The reflection that they-like Columbus-didn't discover what they expected to discover, and didn't discover what they started out to discover, doesn't trouble them. All they remember is that they discovered America; they forget that they started out to discover some patch or corner of India.”

“Ah, if he could only die temporarily!”

“My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.”

“I would rather train someone and lose them, than not train them and keep them”

“My best training came from my father.”

“My falcon now is sharp and passing empty, and till she stoop she must not be full-gorged, for then she never looks upon her lure.”

“You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse”

“Those that do teach young babesDo it with gentle means and easy tasks.”

“Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.”

“To do a great right do a little wrong.”

“Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.”

“Love all, trust a few, Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence, But never tax'd for speech.”

“Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace.”

“Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues.”

“And it is very much lamented,... That you have no such mirrors as will turn Your hidden worthiness into your eye That you might see your shadow.”

“Assume a virtue if you have it not.”

“Best men oft are moulded out of faults.”

“Mend when thou canst; be better at thy leisure.”

“Come, Lady, die to live.”

“I will not be sworn but love may transform me to an oyster”

“But love, first learned in a lady's eyes,Lives not alone immured in the brain;But, with the motion of all elements,Courses as swift as thought in every power,And gives to every power a double power,Above their functions and their offices.”