If we take people only as they are, then we make them worse; if we treat them as if they were what they should be, then we bring them to where they can be brought.

Sing it not in mournful numbers.

So then the year is repeating its old story again. We are come once more, thank God! to its most charming chapter. The violets and the Mayflowers are as its inscriptions or vignettes. It always makes a pleasant impression on us, when we open again at these pages of the book of life.

Accepting good advice means nothing other than to strengthen one's own ability.

Man's highest merit always is, as much as possible, to rule external circumstances and as little as possible to let himself be ruled by them.

Commonplaceness, the surrender to the average, that good which is not bad but still the enemy of the best - That is our besetting danger.

Whoever gives himself up to solitude, Ah! he is soon alone.