The man who occupies the first place seldom plays the principal part.

Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation.

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

I never believed in trying to do anything. Whatever I set out to do I found I had already accomplished.

Error is to truth as sleep is to waking. I have observed that one turns, as if refreshed, from error back to truth.

What we don't understand we don't possess.

The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.