The thousand mysteries around us would not trouble but interest us, if only we had cheerful, healthy hearts.

A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at the end, for a pleasant death.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

It is the evening that questions thus from within me.

Emerson is a person who lives instinctively on ambrosia - and leaves everything indigestible on his plate.

That little hypocrites and half-crazed people dare to imagine that on their account the laws of nature are constantly broken; such an enhancement of every kind of selfishness to infinity, to impudence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt. And yet Christianity owes its triumph to this pitiable flattery of personal vanity.

For our self respect depends upon our ability to make requital, for good or for evil.