Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources.

Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.

Complaint is. more contemptible than pitiful.

Cheerfulness is an offshoot of goodness and of wisdom.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we muse upon it.