I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant.

Improve your spare moments and they will become the brightest gems in your life.

[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.

Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.

When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.