What is the meaning of 'gossip?' Doesn't it originate with sympathy, an interest in one's neighbor, degenerating into idle curiosity and love of tattling? Which is worse, this habit, or keeping one's self so absorbed intellectually as to forget the sufferings and cares of others, to lose sympathy through having too much to think about?

A man may make a misanthrope of himself, but he is never one by nature.

I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.

We were not meant to mask ourselves before our fellow-beings, but to be, through our human forms, true and clear utterances of the spirit within. Since God gave us these bodies, they must have been given us as guides to Him and revealers of Him.

When I heard that there were artists, I wished I could some time be one. If I could only make a rose bloom on paper, I thought I should be happy! Or if I could at last succeed in drawing the outline of winter-stripped boughs as I saw them against the sky, it seemed to me that I should be willing to spend years in trying.

Whoever claims to understand another person completely, is either entirely ignorant of himself, or else has a nature so small that he can measure it easily, and supposes it to be the standard of every other nature.

A drop of water, if it could write out its own history, would explain the universe to us.