Vanity is the most despotic and iniquitous of masters, and I can never be the slave of my own vices.
No religion can be built on force.
Time is always wanting to me, and I cannot meet with a single day when I am nut hurried along, driven to by wits’-end by urgent work, business to attent do or some service to render.
Weakness is oftentimes so palpable as to be equivalent to wickedness.
Punctuation has its own philosophy, just as style does, although not as language does. Style is a good understanding of language, punctuation is a good understanding of style.
You don’t have to write to me if you don’t feel like it. There’s no real friendship without absolute freedom.
You may impose silence upon me, but you can not prevent me from thinking.
One never knows how much a family may grow; and when a hive is too full, and it is necessary to form a new swarm, each one thinks of carrying away his own honey.
The lessons of experience are always learned too late.
Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship.
Nowadays it seems that moral education is no longer considered necessary. Attention is wholly centered on intelligence, while the heart life is ignored.
You see what stupid folk my publishers are; but they are all alike.
To eat together is one of the greatest promoters of intimacy. It is the satisfaction in common of a material necessity of existence, and if you seek a loftier meaning in it, it is a communion...
A child motivated by competitive ideals will grow into a man without conscience, shame, or true dignity.
Weeds are omnipresent; errors are to be found in the heart of the most lovable.
Learned women are ridiculed because they put to shame unlearned men.
I see upon their noble brows the seal of the Lord, for they were born kings of the earth far more truly than those who possess it only from having bought it.
Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.
A man is not a wall, whose stones are crushed upon the road; or a pipe, whose fragments are thrown away at a street corner. The fragments of an intellect are always good.
Some say that cats are devils, but they behave badly only when they are alone. When they are among us cats are angels.