Don't dissipate your powers; strive to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but it will surely repent of every ill-judged outlay.

It is better to do the smallest thing in the world than to hold half an hour to be too small a thing.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

We will burn that bridge when we come to it.

Lamps make oil-spots and candles need snuffing; it is only the light of heaven that shines pure and leaves no stain.

Nature! We are enveloped and embraced by her, incapable of emerging from her and incapable of entering her more deeply. Unbidden and unwarned, she receives us into the circuits of her dance, drifting onward with us herself, until we grow tired and drop from her arms.

It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names to our errors.