He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!

To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory.