We are prisoners of ideas.
I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.
In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.
I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?
The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting – a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.
There is a difference between being convinced and being stubborn.
The world will only, in the end, follow those who have despised as well as served it.
He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.
Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.
Only in the darkness can you see the stars.
The self divides into ten billion distinct illuminating spirits. Distinguish these without falling into names and classifications.
It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.
A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.
All promise outruns performance.
It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.
Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be.
Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.
