A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.

You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

To do nothing is the way to be nothing.

Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal.

In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.