Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.

A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.

As a rule people don't collect books; they let books collect themselves.

The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.

I think it rather fine, this necessity for the tense bracing of the will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel it is to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire.

There is no magic method of beginning... Take hold of your nerves, and jump.

Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.