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.

The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.

Doubt whom you will, but never yourself.

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

Most books fail, not so much from a want of ability in their authors, as from an absence in their productions of a thorough development of their ability.

Enthusiasm is the inspiration of everything great.

Fortune, like a coy mistress, loves to yield her favors, though she makes us wrest them from her.