The best of life is conversation.

It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.

There is also something excellent in every audience,--the capacity of virtue. They are ready to be beatified.

I honor health as the first Muse.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

Meet your failure nobly, and it will not differ from success.

A just thinker will allow full swing to his scepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.... We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.