Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.

A man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country come second to that, and never first.

It is a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death. It is a time when one is filled with vague longings; when one dreams of flight to peaceful islands in the remote solitudes of the sea, or folds his hands and says, What is the use of struggling, and toiling and worrying any more? let us give it all up.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.

No man, deep down in the privacy of his heart, has any considerable respect for himself.