Danger is the very basis of superstition. It produces a searching after help supernaturally when human means are no longer supposed to be available.

Beware of the beginnings of vice. Do not delude yourself with the belief that it can be argued against in the presence of the exciting cause. Nothing but actual flight can save you.

The safest principle through life, instead of reforming others, is to set about perfecting yourself.

The great difficulty is first to win a reputation; the next to keep it while you live; and the next to preserve it after you die, when affection and interest are over, and nothing but sterling excellence can preserve your name. Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.

This is an age of intellectual sauces, of essence, of distillation. We have conclusions without deductions, abridgments of history and abridgments of science without leading facts. We have animals for literature, Cabinet Encyclopaedias, Family Libraries, Diffusion Societies, and heaven knows what else! What is all this for? Not to add knowledge to the learned, but to tell points to the ignorant, without giving them the trouble to acquire the links. Oh! it is sad work. And the result will be injurious to all classes.

To procrastinate seems inherent in man, for if you do to-day that you may enjoy to-morrow it is but deferring the enjoyment; so that to be idle or industrious, vicious or virtuous, is but with a view of procrastinating the one or the other.

Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials.