Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Our poets have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors. To dwell long upon them is to add to the offense.

The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres.