Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.

Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists. It is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men.

What I loved in the man was his health, his unity with himself; all people and all things seemed to find their quite peaceable adjustment with him, not a proud domineering one, as after doubtful contest, but a spontaneous-looking peaceable, even humble one.