The beauty seen is partly in him who sees it.

To cultivate a garden is. . . to go hand in hand with Nature in some of her most beautiful processes.

There are ceremonious bows that repel one like a cudgel.

The language of the heart--the language which "comes from the heart" and "goes to the heart"--is always simple, always graceful, and always full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language--difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied.

Ideas are like matter, infinitely divisible. It is not given to us to get down so to speak to their final atoms, but to their molecular groupings-the way is never ending and the progress infinitely delightful and profitable.

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.

Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.