It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.

I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!

The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.

How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were tobegin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought!

It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.