The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.

Of all words of tongue and pen,

The saddest are, "It might have been."

Over the trackless past, somewhere,

Lie the lost days of our tropic youth,

Only regained by faith and prayer,

Only recalled by prayer and plaint,

Each lost day has its patron saint!

When folks find I ain't afeard to speak my mind on their affairs, they kinder guess I'm tellin' the truth about my own.

Virtue always meets reward, But quicker when it wears a sword.

The delicate thought that cannot find expression,

For ruder speech too fair,

That, like thy petals, trembles in possession,

And scatters on the air.

One big vice in a man is apt to keep out a great many smaller ones.

For the glory born of Goodness

Never dies,

And its flag is not half-masted

In the skies.

Never a lip is curved with pain

That can't be kissed into smiles again.

Perhaps there is no gift of nature that requires as little exertion on the part of the owner as personal beauty. I am not certain but that it is this very absence of effort which excites our admiration.

Love differs from all the other contagious diseases: the last time a man is exposed to it, he takes it most readily, and has it the worst!

The creator who could put a cancer in a believer's stomach is above being interfered with by prayers.

Behind the curtain's mystic fold

The glowing future lies unrolled.

The gaunt limbs, and stark, rigid, death-like whiteness of winter.

Past dreams of bliss our lives contain,

And slight the chords that still retain

A heart estranged to joys again,

To scenes by memory's silver chain

Close-linked, and ever yet apart,

That like the vine, whose tendrils young

Around some fostering branch have clung,

Grown with its growth, as tho' it sprung

From one united heart.

Never a tear bedims the eye

That time and patience will not dry.