There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter.

A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

When a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul where is the substance?

Faint heart never won true friend. O my friend, may it come to pass, once, that when you are my friend I may be yours.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business.