We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods.
We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves, that there may be grounds enough for friendship.
It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover what God is. I say, God. I am not sure that that is the name. You will know what I mean.
If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful.
Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.
As all curves have reference to their centres or foci, so all beauty of character has reference to the soul, and is a graceful gesture of recognition or waving of the body toward it.
There may be something petty in a refined taste; it easily degenerates into effeminacy. It does not consider the broadest use. It is not content with simple good and bad, and so is fastidious and curious or nice only.
Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.
Wealth cannot purchase any great private solace or convenience. Riches are only the means of sociality.
We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.
When some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered yes – remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education – make them hunters.
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.
Most men cry better than they speak. You get more nurture out of them by pinching than addressing them.
I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
The botanist should make interest with the bees if he would know when the flowers open and when they close.
All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.
We must have infinite faith in each other.