I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.

If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful.

Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.

Impulse is, after all, the best linguist; its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing.

The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination,whose vast abdomens betray them.