Love is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.

Friendship is a sheltering tree.

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.

The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.

A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation; but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.

As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.

Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.

No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.