Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood.

In every company, there is not only the active and passive sex, but, in both men and women, a deeper and more important sex of mind, namely, the inventive or creative class of both men and women, and the uninventive or accepting class.

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Spoons and skimmers you can be undistinguishably together; but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself.

The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the intellect.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.