The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and educates what is best in us.

Society will be obeyed if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

What delights us in the spring is more a sensation than an appearance, more a hope than any visible reality. There is something in the softness of the air, in the lengthening of the days, in the very sounds and odors of the sweet time, that caresses us and consoles us after the rigorous weeks of winter.

The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Whole libraries may be skipped in these days, when we have the results of them in our modern culture without going over the ground again.

The opinions of men who think are always growing and changing, like living children.

People have prejudices against a nation in which they have no acquaintances.

Never be afraid of What is good the good is always the road to what is true.

All that we have read and learned, all that has occupied and interested us in the thoughts and deeds of men abler or wiser than ourselves, constitutes at last a spiritual society of which we can never be deprived, for it rests in the heart and soul of the man who has acquired it.

The only hope of preserving what is best, lies in the practice of an immense charity, a wide tolerance, a sincere respect for opinions that are not ours.

Society is, and must be, based upon appearances, and not upon the deepest appearances, and not realities.

You may have a cat in the room with you without anxiety about anything except eatables. The presence of a cat is positively soothing to a student.

As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the man who has an overpowering dread of solitude.

A perfect life is like that of a ship of war which has its own place in the fleet and can share in its strength and discipline, but can also go forth alone in the solitude of the infinite sea. We ought to belong to society, to have our place in it, and yet be capable of a complete individual existence outside of it.

Conversation is interesting in proportion to the originality of the central ideas which serve as pivots and the fitness of the little facts and observations which are contributed by the talkers.

There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks.

Avowed work, even when uncongenial, is far less trying to patience than feigned pleasure.

Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone.