Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.

I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite.

Slow are the beginnings of philosophy.

It is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad; his life may be true, or it may be false; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds himself up; the bad man destroys himself.

How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature!

Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.

I could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, where none already existed. It would be too cruel.