To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.

There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.

The more supple vagabond, too, is sure to appear on the least rumor of such a gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go into his hole like the seventeen-year locust, in an ever-shabby coat, though finer than the farmer's best, yet never dressed.... He especially is the creature of the occasion. He empties both his pockets and his character into the stream, and swims in such a day. He dearly loves the social slush. There is no reserve of soberness in him.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.

The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It was hard to get the commentaries out of one's head and taste its true flavor. [...] It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians.