No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude..

Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear..

All that is literature seeks to communicate power.

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….

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 ….

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….

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

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

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

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..

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….

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….

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..

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….

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

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….

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

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….

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

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

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….