We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.

There is always room for a man of force and he makes room for many. Society is a troop of thinkers and the best heads among them take the best places.

Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.

In the right hands, literature is not resorted to as a consolation, and by the broken and decayed, but as a decalogue.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy or intimacy to come. But whence and when: Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals. Strength enters just as much as the moral element prevails.