If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

God's world is a good place. The one thing not good in it is we. How little justice and humility there is in us. How little we understand true patriotism!

[In] death at least there would be one profit; it would no longer be necessary to eat, to drink, to pay taxes, or to [offend] others; and as a man lies in his grave not one year, but hundreds and thousands of years, the profit was enormous. The life of man was, in short, a loss, and only his death a profit.

Everything on earth is beautiful, everything -- except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.