All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.

Surely the writer is to address a world of laborers, and such therefore must be his own discipline.

You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.

Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning.

Philosophy, having crept clinging to the rocks so far, puts out its feelers many ways in vain.

We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods.