You must either conquer and rule or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

Forget not that the man who cannot enjoy his own natural gifts in silence, and find his reward in the exercise of them, will generally find himself badly off.

Collectors are happy people.

Basic characteristics of an individual organism: to divide, to unite, to merge into the universal, to abide in the particular, to transform itself, to define itself, and as living things tend to appear under a thousand conditions, to arise and vanish, to solidify and melt, to freeze and flow, to expand and contract. Since these effects occur together, any or all may occur at the same moment.

Courage and modesty are the most unequivocal of virtues, for they are of a kind that hypocrisy cannot imitate; they too have this quality in common, that they are expressed by the same color.

We are the slaves of objects around us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand.