We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.

A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession.

A man is known by the books he reads.

Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality.

Intemperance is the only vulgarity.

A man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it.