Our inward power, when it obeys nature, reacts to events by accommodating itself to what it faces - to what is possible. It needs no specific material. It pursues its own aims as circumstances allow; it turns obstacles into fuel. As a fire overwhelms what would have quenched a lamp. What's thrown on top of the conflagration is absorbed, consumed by it - and makes it burn still higher.

It is the act of a madman to pursue impossibilities .

As for literature, thefts cannot harm it, while the lapse of ages augments its value

...small too even the longest fame thereafter, which is itself subject to a succession of little men who quickly die, and have no knowledge of themselves, let alone of those long dead.

Things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within.

The perfection of moral character consists in this, in passing every day as the last, and in being neither violently excited nor torpid nor playing the hypocrite.

Look within, for within is the wellspring of virtue, which will not cease flowing, if you cease not from digging.