The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.
The object of reflection is invariably the discovery of something satisfying to the mind which was not there at the beginning of the search.
Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.
Learn to attack things frontally but according to the most scientific methods.
Whatever we read from intense curiosity gives us a model of how we should always read.
Too often we forget that genius, too, depends upon the data within its reach, that even Archimedes could not have devised Edison’s inventions.
Mankind might be divided between multitude who hate to be kept waiting because they get bored and the happy few who rather like it because it gives them time for thought.
You can believe in God without believing in immortality, but it is hard to see how anyone can believe in immortality and not believe in God.
A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.
Prejudices subsist in people’s imagination long after they have been destroyed by their experience.
Every now and then we discover in the seething mass of humanity round us a person who does not seem to need anybody else, and the contrast with ourselves is stinging.
Do not read good books-life is too short for that-read only the best.
Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.
Reading, to most people, means an ashamed way of killing time disguised under a dignified name.
A school is a place through which you have to pass before entering life, but where the teaching proper does not prepare you for life.
All serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy.
Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it.
Education is the methodical creation of the habit of thinking.
Americans cannot realize how many chances for mental improvement they lose by their inveterate habit of keeping six conversations when there are twelve in the room.
Many men absorbed in business show such a rare quality of culture that we are surprised at it. The reason invariably is partly because hard work and even the weariness it leaves carry a nobility with them, but also because there is no room in such lives for inferior mental occupation.