We cannot do without it, and yet we disgrace and vilify the same. It may be compared to a cage, the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.

In general I ask for books that make use of learning, not those that build it up.

We find ourselves more taken with the running up and down, the games, and puerile simplicities of our children, than we do, afterward, with their most complete actions; as if we had loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men.

If you have known how to compose your life, you have done a great deal more than the person who knows how to compose a book. You have done more than the one who has taken cities and empires.

Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.

Nature has, herself, I fear, imprinted in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity.

Is it reasonable that even the arts should take advantage of and profit by our natural stupidity and feebleness of mind?