“Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.”

Discretion is the salt, and fancy the sugar of life; the one preserves, the other sweetens it.

Great warriors, like great earthquakes, are principally remembered for the mischief they have done.

Give me the character and I will forecast the event.

To vindicate the sanctity of human life by taking it is an outrage upon reason. The spectacle of a human being dangling at the end of a gallows-rope is a degradation of humanity.

If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one.

Dignity of position adds to dignity of character, as well as to dignity of carriage. Give us a proud position, and we are impelled to act up to it.

Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.

Successful love takes a load off our hearts, and puts it upon our shoulders.

We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.

Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses.

Difficulties, by bracing the mind to overcome them, assist cheerfulness, as exercise assists digestion.

Nothing is so fragile as thought in its infancy; an interruption breaks it: nothing is so powerful, even to overturning empires, when it reaches its maturity.

It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

When all else is lost, the future still remains.

Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources.

The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.

In the very shadows of doubt a thread of reason (so to speak) begins, by whose guidance we shall escape to the clearest light.

In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, of all things

You left me in such a state of dire misconception that now I am doubting even my own reflection.

When you start doubting, your mind will start to believe that you will never succeed.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

The dreams we imagine when we are asleep should not in any way make us doubt the truth of the thoughts we have when we are awake.

The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt

For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance