“I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

A contempt of the monuments and the wisdom of the past, may be justly reckoned one of the reigning follies of these days, to which pride and idleness have equally contributed.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society.

Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.

Deviation from Nature is deviation from happiness.

Advice is seldom welcome. Those who need it most, like it least.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

When once the forms of civility are violated, there remains little hope of return to kindness or decency.

Language is the dress of thought; every time you talk your mind is on parade.

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

There are two types of knowledge. One is knowing a thing. The other is knowing where to find it.

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

Never trust your tongue when your heart is bitter.

Women naturally desire the same six things as I; they want their husbands to be brave, wise, rich, generous with money, obedient to the wife, and lively in bed.

The constant desire of pleasing which is the peculiar quality of some, may be called the happiest of all desires in this that it rarely fails of attaining its end when not disgraced by affectation.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

But angels come to lead frail minds to rest in chaste desires, on heavenly beauty bound. You frame my thoughts, and fashion me within; you stop my tongue, and teach my heart to speak.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

So is man’s heart. The desire to perform a work which will endure, which will survive him, is the origin of his superiority over all other living creatures here below. It is this which has established his dominion, and this it is which justifies it, over all the world.

In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

When you want to do the thing that nobody did till now, once this desire comes from your heart, then you don’t have to do anything, that desire will do anything by using your body.