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

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.

What delights us in the spring is more a sensation than an appearance, more a hope than any visible reality. There is something in the softness of the air, in the lengthening of the days, in the very sounds and odors of the sweet time, that caresses us and consoles us after the rigorous weeks of winter.

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

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

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.

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.