Such help as we can give to each other in this world is a debt to each other; and the man who perceives a superiority or a capacity in a subordinate, and neither confesses nor assists it, is not merely the withholder of kindness, but the committer of injury.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

It takes a great deal of living to get a little deal of learning.

The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.

You can only possess beauty through understanding it.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else.

Failure is less attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labours than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done.