A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

To the young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem.

It is vain to keep a secret from one who has a right to know it. It will tell itself.

We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for thesalvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve; and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers.

A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.