Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.

The boxer's ring is the enjoyment of the part of society whose animal nature alone has been developed.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

A man complained that on his way home to dinner he had every day to pass through that long field of his neighbor's. I advised him to buy it, and it would never seem long again.

People are timid and apologetic; they are no longer upright; they dare not say "I think," "I am," but quote some saint or sage. They are ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.