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

If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out ofthe window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.

Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their beautiful generations concern not us: we havehad our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.