Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?

When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.

To eat bread is one thing; to love the precepts of Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another.

There are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them

A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.

When a man becomes a conformist, he is sacrificing the richness of independent thinking.