Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how. - James Russell Lowell

There is no good arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

Bare is back,” says the Norse proverb, “without brother behind it;” and this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of prestige, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully create all these out of the unwilling material around him, by superiority of character, by patient singleness of purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies and instinctive sympathy with the national character. Mr. Lincoln’s task was one of peculiar and exceptional difficulty.