Pain makes hens and poets cackle.

Anecdote: Greatness Means Leading the Way. No stream is large and copious of itself, but becomes great by receiving and leading on so many tributary streams. It is so, also, with all intellectual greatness, It is only a question of someone indicating the direction to be followed by so many affluent; not whether he was richly or poorly gifted originally.

On the heights it is warmer than people in the valley suppose, especially in winter. The thinker recognizes the full import of this simile.

Enjoyment and innocence are the most bashful things: both do not want to be sought.

Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.

Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful--but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away.