We change whether we like it or not.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

Every artist was first an amateur.

The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.