At least be sure you go to the author to find his meaning, not to find yours. - John Ruskin

The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.

The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.

It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact, out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.