Human beings cannot endure the geological chaos they encounter under the soil of their own gardens.

The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.

Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions.

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.

Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.

The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never vertically.