We should comfort ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages-stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.

When a man has reached a condition in which he believes that a thing must happen because he does not wish it, and that what he wishes to happen never will be, this is really the state called desperation.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other

Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.

There is no vice of which a man can be guilty, no meanness, no shabbiness, no unkindness, which excites so much indignation among his contemporaries, friends and neighbours, as his success. This is the one unpardonable crime, which reason cannot defend, nor humility mitigate.

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.