How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.