In learning to know other things, and other minds, we become more intimately acquainted with ourselves, and are to ourselves better worth knowing..

A perfect life is like that of a ship of war which has its own place in the fleet and can share in its strength and discipline, but can also go forth….

Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself i….

High culture always isolates, always drives men out of their class, and makes it more difficult for them to share naturally and easily the common cla….

We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest..

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 ….

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

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

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….

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….

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….

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….

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….

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..

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.