Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist has a higher office than merely and amuse his contemporaries.

People have prejudices against a nation in which they have no acquaintances.

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.

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.

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

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?

Society is, and must be, based upon appearances, and not upon the deepest appearances, and not realities.