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.

Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone.

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.

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?

Culture is like wealth; it makes us more ourselves, it enables us to express ourselves

As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the man who has an overpowering dread of solitude.

Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is, by these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age.