“A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.”
“Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.”
“You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.”
“All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.”
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”
“In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.”
“It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.”
“We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.”
“If a man loves the labor of his trade apart from any question of success or fame, the Gods have called him.”
“There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.”
“Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.”
“Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”
“So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”
“When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.”
“You cannot run away from weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?”
“To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”
“The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.”
“I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.”
“Quite minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
“Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.”
“Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.”
“He travels best that knows when to return. Middleton For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”
“To make our idea of morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.”
“The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his mouth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.”
“If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say ''give them up,'' for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.”
“Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.”
“When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.”
“I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.”
“Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.”
“You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.”