"The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion 20 years later."

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."

"Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are."

"A man is known by the books he reads."

"Use language what you will, you can never say anything but what you are."

"The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is."

"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."

"Quotation confesses inferiority."

"The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common."

"Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding."

"A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends."

"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue."

"Men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places."

"Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams."

"We look wishfully to emergencies to eventful revolutionary times ... and think how easy to have taken our part when the drum was rolling and the house was burning over our heads."

"It is a happy talent to know how to play."

"The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society."

"In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me."

"The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy."

"Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints."

"If peace is to be maintained, it must be by brave men, who have come up to the same height as the hero, namely, the will to carry their life in their hand, and stake it at any instant for their principle, but who have gone one step beyond the hero, and will not seek another man's life."

"To fill the hour and leave no crevice ... that is happiness."

"Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art."

"Character is that which can do without success."

"O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear!"

"Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much."

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."

"I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today."

"Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes."

"In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity."

"Some books leave us free and some books make us free."

"Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams."

"All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear."

"Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!"

"Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait."

"You become what you think about all day long."

"Virtues are in the popular estimate rather the exception than the rule."

"Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them."

"The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible."

"Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant."

"We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse."

"The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried."

"Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others."

"All diseases run into one, old age."

"In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one."

"We must be our own before we can be another's."

"There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us."

"He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets - most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth."

"Does not- the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?"

"Nature hates calculators."