It is better to debate a question without deciding it than to decide it without debate.
Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear.
To teach is to learn twice.
Time and truth are friends, though there are many moments hostile to truth.
Innocence is always unsuspicious.
There is a physical weakness which stems from mental ability, and a mental weakness which comes from physical ability.
All that is good in man lies in youthful feeling and mature thought.
We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.
Ask the young. They know everything.
All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.
God has commanded Time to console the unhappy.
Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.
Politeness is the flower of humanity.
You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
True religion is the poetry of the heart; it has enchantments useful to our manners; it gives us both happiness and virtue.
The evening of a well-spent life brings its lamps with it.
Do not choose for your wife any woman you would not choose as your friend if she were a man.
To be an agreeable guest one need only enjoy oneself.
What is true by lamplight is not always true by sunlight.
There are single thoughts that contain the essence of the whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of large work.
Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features.
Our ideals, like pictures, are made from lights and shadows.
Never cut what you can untie.
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
The talkative man speaks from his mouth, the eloquent man speaks from his heart.
Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.
Drawing is speaking to the eye; talking is painting to the ear.
It is an aspect of all happiness to suppose that we deserve it.
Space is to place as eternity is to time.