The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory..

If you want a friend you need to be a friend..

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring. Any absorbing passion has the effect to deliver from the little coils and cares of every day: ….

The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yetaccredited: one get….

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in ….

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science, and such is the mechanical determination of our age, and so recent are our best contrivances….

Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well, and say it through; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-di….

It is a tie between men to have read the same book..

You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday though it may be, I have not the smallest interest in any holiday, except as it celebrates re….

To the men of this world, to the animal strength and spirits, to the men of practical power, whilst immersed in it, the man of ideas appears out of h….

Everything good is on the highway..

He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. Bu….

Truth is too simple for us: we do not like those who unmask our illusions..

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig..

In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it..

We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations, and especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with, and all are tri….

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose..

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of th….

Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today..

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, if we would truli….

Be lord of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history books..