Wisdom

For repose is not the end of education; its end is a noble unrest, an ever renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than retarded into lethargy.

I think that in all descriptions of the good life here on earth we must assume a certain basis of animal vitality and animal instinct; without this, life becomes tame and uninteresting.

Civilization should be something added to this, not substituted for it,

A small number of them may enrich a community; but a world composed of them would die of boredom.

I cannot admit that they are living the good life.

One becomes calmer regarding many things, and precisely because of that one is more fit for one's work.

What God hath made, into that let man inquire.

There is no conceivable way of making people do things they do not wish to do.

I count myself happy, in the search after truth, to have so great an ally as yourself, and one who is so great a friend of the truth itself.

For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it.

The reading, not of all books, but especially of such as have been written by persons capable of conveying proper instruction, for it is a species of conversation we hold with their authors.

It does not suffice that the understanding be good - it must be well applied.

The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations.

The first degree contains only notions so clear of themselves that they can be acquired without meditation.

I shall only add a promise to peruse your book dispassionately, and with a conviction that I shall find in it much to admire.

Man is a growth by law, and not a creation by artifice, and cause and effect is as absolute and undeviating in the hidden realm of thought as in the world of visible and material things.

Thought and character are one, and as character can only manifest and discover itself through environment and circumstance, the outer conditions of a person's life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his inner state.

A man may be cursed and rich; he may be blessed and poor.

Absence of occupation is not rest, A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd.

Happy the man who sees a God employed In all the good and ill that chequer life!