What is lovely never dies, But passes into other loveliness.
A man is known by the company his mind keeps.
To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent - that is to triumph over old age.
Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.
A man should have duties outside of himself; without them, he is a mere balloon, inflated with thin egotism and drifting nowhere.
A man may do worse than make what the world calls a not wholly happy marriage.
Rome is one enormous mausoleum. There, the Past lies visibly stretched upon his bier. There is no today or tomorrow in Rome; it is perpetual yesterday.
Everywhere on the Continent, the tourist is looked upon as a bird to be plucked, and presently the bird himself feebly comes to regard plucking as his proper destiny and abjectly holds out his wing so long as there is a feather left on it.
They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.
True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.
Nothing except time is wasted in Italy.
I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.
A habit leads a man so gently in the beginning that he does not perceive he is led - with what silken threads and down what pleasant avenues it leads him! By and by, the soft silk threads become iron chains, and the pleasant avenues Avernus!
There is no man at once so unselfish and selfish as a man in love.
The dead play a very prominent part in the experience of the wanderer abroad. The houses in which they were born, the tombs in which they lie, the localities they made famous by their good or evil deeds, and the works their genius left behind them are necessarily the chief shrines of his pilgrimage.
The Stamp Act was to go into operation on the first day of November. On the previous morning, the 'New Hampshire Gazette' appeared with a deep black border and all the typographical emblems of affliction, for was not Liberty dead?
Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.
The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.
The ocean moans over dead men's bones.
There must be such a thing as a child with average ability, but you can't find a parent who will admit that it is his child.
