He whom God hath gifted with a love of retirement possesses, as it were, an extra sense.

When a person is down in the world, an ounce of help is better than a pound of preaching.

Nothing so good as a university education, nor worse than a university without its education.

The brave man wants no charms to encourage him to his duty, and the good man scorns all warnings that would deter him from fulfilling it.

Birds sing in vain to the ear, flowers bloom in vain to the eye, of mortified vanity and galled ambition. He who would know repose in retirement must carry into retirement his destiny, integral and serene, as the Caesars transported the statue of Fortune into the chamber they chose for their sleep.

Art itself is essentially ethical; because every true work of art must have a beauty or grandeur of some kind, and beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral sentiment. The eye is only a witness; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical.

If there is a virtue in the world at which we should always aim, it is cheerfulness.