Energy will do anything that can be done in this world.
What makes people happy is activity; changing evil itself into good by power, working in a God like manner.
Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to that path which nature has marked out for him.
How can we know ourselves? Never by reflection, but only through action. Begin at once to do your duty and immediately you will know what is inside you.
The art of living rightly is like all arts; it must be learned and practiced with incessant care.
To understand one thing well is better than understanding many things by halves.
People may live as much retired from the world as they please; but sooner or later, before they are aware, they will find themselves debtor or creditor to somebody.
In every artist there is a touch of audacity without which no talent is conceivable.
Theories are usually the over-hasty efforts of an impatient understanding that would gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their place pictures, notions, nay, often mere words.
Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance, and make a religion of surrendering to it.
Tolerance comes of age. I see no fault committed that I myself could not have committed at some time or other.
What then is your duty? What the day demands.
Man’s highest merit always is, as much as possible, to rule external circumstances and as little as possible to let himself be ruled by them.
I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wants.
Everything we do has a result. But that which is right and prudent does not always lead to good, nor the contrary to what is bad.
Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing and of what is not knowable.
There is no permanence in doubt; it incites the mind to closer inquiry and experiment, from which, if rightly managed, certainty proceeds, and in this alone can man find thorough satisfaction.
Whether one show one’s self a man of genius in science or compose a song, the only point is, whether the thought, the discovery, the deed, is living and can live on.
Nature does not suffer her veil to be taken from her, and what she does not choose to reveal to the spirit, thou wilt not wrest from her by levers and screws.
Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.