"The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things."

"Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it."

"Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement."

"The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present."

"All serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy."

"Ideas are the root of creation."

"Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves."

"Education is the methodical creation of the habit of thinking."

"Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul."

"A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers."

"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."