Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.

The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.

Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.

Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

Jewish authors would never have invented either that style nor that morality; and the Gospel has marks of truth so great, so striking, so utterly inimitable, that the invention of it would be more astonishing than the hero.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.