There is a wide difference between general acquaintance and companionship. You may salute a man and exchange compliments with him daily, yet know nothing of his character, his inmost tastes arid feelings.

What lasting progress was ever made in social reformation, except when every step was insured by appeals to the understanding and the will?

There is a wide difference between general acquaintance and companionship. You may salute a man and exchange compliments with him daily, yet know nothing of his character, his inmost tastes arid feelings.

Talking, is a digestive process which is absolutely essential to the mental constitution of the man who devours many books.

Solitary reading will enable a man to stuff himself with information, but without conversation his mind will become like a pond without an outlet-a mass of unhealthy stag-nature. It is not enough to harvest knowledge by study; the wind of talk must winnow it and blow away the chaff. Then will the clear, bright grains of wisdom be garnered, for our own use or that of others.

It is not, of course, the subject that is or isn't dull, but the quality of attention that we do or do not pay to it. Dull subjects are those we have failed.

The petty cares, the minute anxieties, the infinite littles which go to make up the sum of human experience, like the invisible granules of powder, give the last and highest polish to a character.