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

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.

The one mistake which is committed habitually by people who have the gift of half-genius, is waiting for inspiration.

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

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.

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

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.