I have done what I could do in life, and if I could not do better, I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.

You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day, but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come.

The thoughts you think will irradiate you as though you are a transparent vase.

An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.

Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.

The true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind.

The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.