For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

Let not the author eat up the man, so that he shall be all balcony and no house.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

We sometimes observe that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem tomeasure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented if you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations.

A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.

The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.