Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed! A true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is li….

Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion..

All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it..

Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o'clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shu….

Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state..

But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider w….

All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in it velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite...Upon a ni….

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world ….

All men come into this world alone and leave it alone..

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-break….

Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelat….

Allow me to offer my congratulations on the truly admirable skill you have shown in keeping clear of the mark. Not to have hit once in so many trials….

There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is--to teach; the function of the second….

For tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities, or are become so from wine-drinking, and are not suscepti….

The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth..

The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect..

Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes..

I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible..

It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety..

As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius..

It is one of the misfortunes in life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them..