Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent.
Everything is simpler than one can imagine, and yet complicated and inter-twined beyond comprehension.
Do you want to live happily? Travel with two bags, one for giving, the other for receiving.
Architecture is crystallized music.
But one must know where one stands, and where the others wish to go.
Beware of dissipating your powers; strive constantly to concentrate them.
Faith is hidden household capital.
Let us live, while we are alive!
Life’s objective is life itself.
Even the lowliest, provided he is whole, can be happy, and in his own. way, perfect.
Time itself is an element.
Time is my estate: to Time I’m heir.
God made man simple, but how he changed and got complicated is hard to say.
It is so hard that one cannot really have confidence in doctors and yet cannot do without them.
No man learns to know his inmost nature by introspection, for he rates himself sometimes too low, and often too high, by his own measurement. Man knows himself only by comparing himself with other men; it is life that touches his genuine worth.
Oh God, how do the world and heavens confine themselves, when our hearts tremble in their own barriers!
When you take a man as he is, you make him worse. When you take a man as he can be, you make him better.
Certain books seem to be written, not that we might learn from them, but in order that we might see how much the author knows.
Most men, even the most accomplished, are of limited faculties; every one sets a value on certain qualities in himself and others: these alone he is willing to favour, these alone will he have cultivated.
The loss of a much-prized treasure is only half felt when we have not regarded its tenure as secure.