In reading and writing, you cannot lay down rules until you have learnt to obey them. Much more so in life.

Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.

It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men's badness, which is impossible.

He does not write at all whose poems no man reads

If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.

You are making an inopportune rejection of what Nature has given you today, if all your mind is set on what men will say of you tomorrow.

All is as thinking makes it so