Books wind into the heart.

What passes in the world for talent or dexterity or enterprise is often only a want of moral principle. We may succeed where others fail, not from a greater share of invention, but from not being nice in the choice of expedients.

The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.

The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.

We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.