As the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, so should you stop off your miscellaneous activity and concentrate your force on one or a few points.

Cannot we let [children] be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough.

Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.

I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.

Instead of making Christianity a vehicle of truth, you make truth only a horse for Christianity.

We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think.

All the fairy tales of Aladdin, or the invisible Gyges, or the talisman that opens kings' palaces, or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicated the one miracle of intellectual enlargement.