Hitch your wagon to a star.
Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.
Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.
The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.
The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.
He that gives good advice builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example builds with both.
It is a strange desire, to seek power and lose liberty, or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man’s self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains, and it is sometimes base; and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing.
Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.
The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
If we don’t occupy ourself with everything, then peaceful mind will have nowhere to abide.
There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven’t started wondering about yet.
Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.
Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.
That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.
Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.
Where Example keeps pace with Authority, Power hardly fails to be obey’d.
A wise man makes what he learns his own, the other shows he is but a copy or a collection at most.
I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbors about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.
