After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.

We are disgusted by gossip; yet it is of importance to keep the angels in their proprieties.

As much wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may be drawn from it.

Not a ray is dimmed, not an atom worn; nature's oldest force is as good as new.

No society can ever be so large as one man.

The refining influence is the study of art, which is the science of beauty; and I find that every man values every scrap of knowledge in art, every observation of his own in it, every hint he has caught from another. For the laws of beauty are the beauty of beauty, and give the mind the same or a higher joy than the sight of it gives the senses. The study of art is of high value to the growth of the intellect.

We are the prisoners of ideas.