Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?

The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Whole libraries may be skipped in these days, when we have the results of them in our modern culture without going over the ground again.

All that we have read and learned, all that has occupied and interested us in the thoughts and deeds of men abler or wiser than ourselves, constitutes at last a spiritual society of which we can never be deprived, for it rests in the heart and soul of the man who has acquired it.

We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest.

Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

The only hope of preserving what is best, lies in the practice of an immense charity, a wide tolerance, a sincere respect for opinions that are not ours.

I wonder how it is that so cheerful-looking a tree as the willow should ever have become associated with ideas of sadness.