Mediocrity is beneath a brave soul.

Our weaknesses are the indigenous produce of our characters; but our strength is the forced fruit.

You were wise not to waste years in a lawsuit ... he who commences a suit resembles him who plants a palm-tree which he will not live to see flourish.

Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory . . .

There is no knowledge for which so great a price is paid as a knowledge of the world; and no one ever became an adept in it except at the expense of a hardened or a wounded heart.

There are some chagrins of the heart which a friend ought to try to console without betraying a knowledge of their existence, as there are physical maladies which a physician ought to seek to heal without letting the sufferer know that he has discovered their extent.

Mountains appear more lofty the nearer they are approached, but great men resemble them not in this particular.