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

You may have a cat in the room with you without anxiety about anything except eatables. The presence of a cat is positively soothing to a student.

Unless a man works he cannot find out what he is able to do.

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.

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.

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

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