Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone.... Freedom is of the essence, because you should be able to stop and go on and follow this way or that as the freak takes you.... There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow to jar on the meditative silence of the morning.

The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for and the public curiosity is sure to welcome.

His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.

There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well.

He who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up riches against the day of riches.

You can kill the body, but not the spirit.

It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews a man's character from the fountain upwards.