Whenever you hold a fellow creature in distress, remember that he is a man.
Pain, scorned by yonder gout-ridden wretch, endured by yonder dyspeptic in the midst of his dainties, borne bravely by the girl in travail. Slight thou art, if I can bear thee, short thou art if I cannot bear thee!
So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.
We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.
I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?
Wealth is the slave of a wise man. The master of a fool.
He is a king who fears nothing, he is a king who desires nothing!
Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man’s power to live long.
The artist finds a greater pleasure in painting than in having completed the picture.
You talk one way, you live another.
Take away ambition and vanity, and where will be your heroes and patriots?
Many things have fallen only to rise higher.
No evil is without its compensation. The less money, the less trouble; the less favor, the less envy. Even in those cases which put us out of wits, it is not the loss itself, but the estimate of the loss that troubles us.
Nothing is so false as human life, nothing so treacherous. God knows no one would have accepted it as a gift, if it had not been given without our knowledge.
I persist on praising not the life I lead, but that which I ought to lead. I follow it at a mighty distance, crawling.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
No crime has been without a precedent.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
No one can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it.
A dwarf can stand on a mountain, he’s no taller.