All quotes

The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking back, I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for some shadow of what he was to be.

Love should run out to meet love with open arms.

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.

The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget.

Many friendships are formed by a community of sensual pleasures: all these will be cut off.

Parents we can have but once; and he promises himself too much, who enters life with the expectation of finding many friends.

The longer we live, and the more we think, the higher value we learn to put on the friendship and tenderness of parents and of friends.

A long life may be passed without finding a friend in whose understanding and virtue we can equally confide, and whose opinion we can value at once for its justness and sincerity.

When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle.

You can’t change the world alone — you will need some help — and to truly get from your starting point to your destination takes friends, colleagues, the good will of strangers and a strong coxswain to guide them.

Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at wit or dull common-places, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart which alone is perfect eloquence.

It asks a troublesome effort to ensure the admiration of others: it is a still greater one to be satisfied with one's own thoughts.

Even in the same family the gap is not so great; the wound closes up sooner than we should expect.

It tends to isolate them from each other, to concentrate every man's attention upon himself; and it lays open the soul to an inordinate love of material gratification.

It is the monotony of his own nature that makes a man find solitude intolerable.

Ordinary people are sociable and complaisant just from the very opposite feeling;--to bear others' company is easier for them than to bear their own.

The prime reason for social intercourse is mutual need; and as soon as that is satisfied, boredom drives people together once more.

the need of society drives the human porcupines together--only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature

It is not kind in you to desire an increase of my friendship; that is to doubt it is not as great already as it can be, than which you cannot do me a greater injury.

There are probably as many different dialects for the heart as for the tongue, are there not?

The breakfast was eaten in silence, the women humbled with a sense of their helplessness, and the men gratified with a sense of their power.

The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.