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

It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence upon us.

It is seldom that we find out how great are our resources until we are thrown upon them.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so much as a crime

The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.

He that shrinks from the grave with too great a dread, has an invisible fear behind him pushing him into it.