Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?

Learn to be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in,--a real, not an imaginary,--and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.

Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?

Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall.

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.