Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.
I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.
Do not read the newspapers.
Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary.
We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.
If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer.
Since all things are good, men fail at last to distinguish which is the bane and which the antidote.
There is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span.
What avails it that another loves you, if he does not understand you? Such love is a curse.
We bless and curse ourselves.
The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure.
The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.
Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.
We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.
Surely the writer is to address a world of laborers, and such therefore must be his own discipline.
The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.
I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.
A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.
If you indulge in long periods, you must be sure to have a snapper at the end.
It would be no reproach to a philosopher, that he knew the future better than the past, or even than the present. It is better worth knowing.