Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.

At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.

Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.

The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them

Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.

Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.