I take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft.

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.

trouble always seems heavier when it is only one's thought and not one's bodily activity that is employed about it.

All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children -- in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion but in the secret of deep human sympathy.

... when one's outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.