Continued work and application form my soul's nourishment. So soon as I commenced to rest and relax I should cease to live.

From thought to thought, from mountain peak to mountain. Love leads me on; for I can never still My trouble on the world's well beaten ways.

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.

It is more honorable to be raised to a throne than to be born to one. Fortune bestows the one, merit obtains the other.

Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.

Often have I wondered with much curiosity as to our coming into this world and what will follow our departure.

Books never pall on me. They discourse with us, they take counsel with us, and are united to us by a certain living chatty familiarity. And not only does each book inspire the sense that it belongs to its readers, but it also suggests the name of others, and one begets the desire of the other.