What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?

Then I though of reading - the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.

Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.

All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.