The books that charmed us in youth recall the delight ever afterwards; we are hardly persuaded there are any like them, any deserving our equal affections.
Children are illuminated text-books, breviaries of doctrine, living bodies of divinity, open always and inviting their elders to peruse the characters inscribed on the lovely leaves.
An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best.
Pleasure, that immortal essence, the beauteous bead sparkling in the cup, effervesces soon and subsides.
Our favorites are few; since only what rises from the heart reaches it, being caught and carried on the tongues of men wheresoever love and letters journey.
A man defines his standing at the court of chastity by his views of women.
Wherever comes man comes tragedy and comedy also.
There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields, streams and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy.
Many are those who can argue; few are those who can converse.
No one is promiscuous in his way of dying. A man who has decided to hang himself will never jump in front of a train.
Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.
Enthusiasm is essential to the successful attainment of any high endeavor.
Despair snuffs the sun from the firmament.
I consider it the best part of an education to have been born and brought up in the country.
Good discourse sinks differences and seeks agreements.
Egotists cannot converse, they talk to themselves only.
Debate is angular, conversation circular and radiant of the underlying unity.
Conversation is an abandonment to ideas, a surrender to persons.
The passions refuse to be organized on a basis of their own; hostile to personal freedom and one another, they rush precipitately into anarchy and mob rule.
I am an idea without hands.
When a man’s own culture falls behind that of his time, he is conservative. When it outstrips and enables him to over-see his time, he is a reformer.