I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

Virtue can have naught to do with ease. . . . It craves a steep and thorny path.

Learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.

There is a huge gulf between the man who follows the conventions and laws of his country and the man who sets out to regiment them and to change them.

God defend me from myself.

Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something; my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work.

Few men have been admired of their familiars.