Guard your own spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds.

It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern.

We may like well to know what is Plato’s and what is Montesquieu’s or Goethe’s part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

The eye is the best of artists.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.