Happiness is impossible, and even inconceivable, to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, or fear. To be happy, you must be reasonable, or you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy, you must be wise.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.