The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.

A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.

Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.