Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.

Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation.

Far better, and more cheerfully, I could dispense with some part of the downright necessaries of life, than with certain circumstances of elegance and propriety in the daily habits of using them.

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

The public is a bad guesser.

The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.

A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.