In all societies, it is advisable to associate if possible with the highest; not that the highest are always the best, but because, if disgusted there, we can descend at any time; but if we begin with the lowest, to ascend is impossible.
Love is an alliance of friendship and animalism; if the former predominates it is passion exalted and refined; if the latter, gross and sensual.
Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.
Heaven may have happiness as utterly unknown to us as the gift of perfect vision would be to a man born blind. If we consider the inlets of pleasure from five senses only, we may be sure that the same Being who created us could have given us five hundred, if He had pleased.
No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it.
By paying our other debts, we are equal with all mankind; but in refusing to pay a debt of revenge, we are superior.
An act by which we make one friend and one enemy is a losing game; because revenge is a much stronger principle than gratitude.
Most importantly: Don’t adjust your results to build up the ego of the chief strategist. Especially if the strategist is you.
Be real and adjust you strategy according to honest results.
My lowest days as a Christian have been more fulfilling and rewarding than all the days of glory in the White House.
He that has never suffered extreme adversity knows not the full extent of his own depravation.
Let those who would affect singularity with success first determine to be very virtuous, and they will be sure to be very singular.
The science of mathematics performs more than it promises, but the science of metaphysics promises more than it performs.
The smiling daughter of the storm.
Injuries accompanied with insults are never forgiven: all men, on these occasions, are good haters, and lay out their revenge at compound interest.
That cowardice is incorrigible which the love of power cannot overcome.
Where we cannot invent, we may at least improve.
We ask advice but we mean approbation.
Were we as eloquent as angels we still would please people much more by listening rather than talking.
The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society’s most basic values.