“No particular motive for living, except the custom and habit of it.”

Business first; pleasure afterwards.

To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted my no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; to forgo even ambition when the end is gained – who can say this is not greatness?

Let a man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim: Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world yields, or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and you will succeed.

It’s a great comfort to some people to groan over their imaginary ills.

We know that Heaven chastens those whom it loves best; being pleased by repeated trials, to make pure spirits more pure.

Vanity is often the unseen spur.

Lucky he who has been educated to bear his fate, whatsoever it may be, by an early example of uprightness, and a childish training in honor.

When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise.

Oh, Vanity of vanities! How wayward the decrees of Fate are; How very weak the very wise, How very small the very great are!

Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone?

Sir, Respect Your Dinner: idolize it, enjoy it properly. You will be many hours in the week, many weeks in the year, and many years in your life happier if you do.

Alas! we are the sport of destiny.

The great moments of life are but moments like the others. Your doom is spoken in a word or two. A single look from the eyes; a mere pressure of the hand, may decide it; or of the lips though they cannot speak.

Humor is wit and love.

It is comparatively easy to leave a mistress, but very hard to be left by one.

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.

I resolved to claim for my sex all that an impartial Creator had bestowed, which, by custom and a perverted application of the Scriptures, had been wrested from woman.

I knew that I would speak in the language of the vanquished No more durable than old customs, family rituals, Christmas tinsel, and once a year the hilarity of carols.

A deep meaning often lies in old customs.

Strange customs do not thrive in foreign soil.

All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues.

I just wish this social institution [religion] wasnt based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isnt true.

The morality of customs,the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law.

Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man’s origin, capacity and responsibility.