For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
I believe in the possibility of happiness if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions including optimism.
There is nothing to which men while they have food and drink cannot reconcile themselves.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,...
To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
The worship of power is an old religion.
love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has bee...
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.