I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society.

I pray that the life of this spring and summer may ever lie fair in my memory.

A noble person confers no such gift as his whole confidence: none so exalts the giver and the receiver; it produces the truest gratitude. Perhaps it is only essential to friendship that some vital trust should have been reposed by the one in the other. I feel addressed and probed even to the remotest parts of my being when one nobly shows, even in trivial things, an implicit faith in me.... A threat or a curse may be forgotten, but this mild trust translates me.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

The gifts of Heaven are never quite gratuitous.

Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home.

It would be no reproach to a philosopher, that he knew the future better than the past, or even than the present. It is better worth knowing.