It is of no avail to know what is about to happen; for it is a sad thing to be grieved when grief can do no good.

Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.

We are born poets. we become orators.

To wonder at nothing when it happens, to consider nothing impossible before it has come to pass.

This, therefore, is a law not found in books, but written on the fleshly tablets of the heart, which we have not learned from man, received or read, but which we have caught up from Nature herself, sucked in and imbibed; the knowledge of which we were not taught, but for which we were made; we received it not by education, but by intuition.

Just what is the civil law? What neither influence can affect, nor power break, nor money corrupt: were it to be suppressed or even merely ignored or inadequately observed, no one would feel safe about anything, whether his own possessions, the inheritance he expects from his father, or the bequests he makes to his children.

Thus in the beginning the world was so made that certain signs come before certain events.