When young men or women are beginning life, the most important period, it is often said, is that in which their habits are formed. That is a very important period. But the period in which the ideals of the young are formed and adopted is more important still. For the ideal with which you go forward to measure things determines the nature, so far as you are concerned, of everything you meet.

It's not work that kills [people], it is worry.

You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door.

As the imagination is set to look into the invisible and immaterial, it seems to attract something of their vitality; and though it can give nothing to the body to redeem it from years, it can give to the soul that freshness of youth in old age which is even more beautiful than youth in the young.

No cradle for an emperor's child was ever prepared with so much magnificence as this world has been made for man. But it is only his cradle.

A man that has lost moral sense is like a man in battle with both of his legs shot off: he has nothing to stand on.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.