For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook.

All the past is here, present to be tried; let it approve itself if it can.

We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.

Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.

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.