High culture always isolates, always drives men out of their class, and makes it more difficult for them to share naturally and easily the common class-life around them. They seek the few companions who can understand them, and when these are not to be had within a traversable distance, they sit and work alone.

Few of us have been so exceptionally unfortunate as not to find, in our own age, some experienced friend who has helped us by precious counsel, never to be forgotten. We cannot render it in kind, but perhaps in the fulness of time it may become our noblest duty to aid another as we have ourselves been aided, and to transmit to him an invaluable treasure, the tradition of the intellectual life.

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.

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.

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

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?