Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other.
Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one’s own inner self.
Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
Learned we may be with another man’s learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.
I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.
Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.
I had rather fashion my mind than furnish it.
The births of all things are weak and tender and therefore we should have our eyes intent on beginnings.
Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and apply myself to them if they will not apply themselves to me.
I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.
I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden.
Every man carries the entire form of human condition.
On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.
The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
He who does not live in some degree for others, hardly lives for himself.
We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.
Valor is strength, not of legs and arms, but of heart and soul; it consists not in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own.
The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.