“I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.” 

To fill the hour – that is happiness.

“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.” 

A moment is a concentrated eternity.

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” 

“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?” 

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is, “Let there be truth between us two forever more”.

Always scorn appearances, and you always may.

Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.

The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, obey thyself.

So is cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more remains.

There is no knowledge that is not power.

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.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

Free should the scholar be, — free and brave… Brave; for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance… The world is his, who can see through its pretension.