The only hope of preserving what is best, lies in the practice of an immense charity, a wide tolerance, a sincere respect for opinions that are not ours.

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.

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

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

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

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

All that we have read and learned, all that has occupied and interested us in the thoughts and deeds of men abler or wiser than ourselves, constitutes at last a spiritual society of which we can never be deprived, for it rests in the heart and soul of the man who has acquired it.