Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.
It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss.
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.
Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway.
Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.
Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.
We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
Memory itself is an internal rumour.
The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.
Fear first created the gods.
People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.