Avowed work, even when uncongenial, is far less trying to patience than feigned pleasure.

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?

There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks.

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.

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

In learning to know other things, and other minds, we become more intimately acquainted with ourselves, and are to ourselves better worth knowing.

Conversation is interesting in proportion to the originality of the central ideas which serve as pivots and the fitness of the little facts and observations which are contributed by the talkers.