Youth is in danger until it learns to look upon debts as furies.

The more a man desirous to pass at a value above his worth can contrast, by dignified silence, the garrulity of trivial minds, the more the world will give him credit for the wealth which he does not possess.

Leave glory to great folks. Ah, castles in the air cost a vast deal to keep up!

If you are in doubt whether to write a letter or not, don't. And the advice applies to many doubts in life besides that of letter writing.

Why should the soul ever repose? God, its Principle, reposes never.

What is past is past, there is a future left to all men, who have the virtue to repent and the energy to atone.

Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud--and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.