Then climate is a great impediment to idle persons; we often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but still we regard the clouds and the rain.

Every man is grave alone.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Always maintain your common sense and artful skills, and funnel it all into plain enough dealings.

The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base.

We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.