We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

In the meanest are all the materials of manhood, only they are not rightly disposed.

Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.

I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.

If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.... You are paid for being something less than a man. The state does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?

While some men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.