The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.

Law never made men a whit more just.

The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.

But they who are unconcerned about the consequences of their actions are not therefore unconcerned about their actions.

The golden mean in ethics, as in physics, is the centre of the system and that about which all revolve, and though to a distant and plodding planet it be an uttermost extreme, yet one day, when that planet's year is completed, it will be found to be central.

Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans.

I have a room all to myself; it is nature.