The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.

Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is.

It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.

My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.

The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.