You may have a cat in the room with you without anxiety about anything except eatables. The presence of a cat is positively soothing to a student..

The one mistake which is committed habitually by people who have the gift of half-genius, is waiting for inspiration..

The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Whole libraries may be skipped in these days, when we have the results of them in our modern culture witho….

There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks..

As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the man who has an overpow….

Society is, and must be, based upon appearances, and not upon the deepest appearances, and not realities..

The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and educates what is best in us..

What delights us in the spring is more a sensation than an appearance, more a hope than any visible reality. There is something in the softness of th….

Culture is like wealth; it makes us more ourselves, it enables us to express ourselves.

Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone..

Never be afraid of What is good; the good is always the road to what is true..

The opinions of men who think are always growing and changing, like living children..

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?.

Few of us have been so exceptionally unfortunate as not to find, in our own age, some experienced friend who has helped us by precious counsel, never….

Conversation is interesting in proportion to the originality of the central ideas which serve as pivots and the fitness of the little facts and obser….

The only hope of preserving what is best, lies in the practice of an immense charity, a wide tolerance, a sincere respect for opinions that are not o….

All that we have read and learned, all that has occupied and interested us in the thoughts and deeds of men abler or wiser than ourselves, constitute….

Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist ….

Avowed work, even when uncongenial, is far less trying to patience than feigned pleasure..

People have prejudices against a nation in which they have no acquaintances..

Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or liter….