Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?

As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the man who has an overpowering dread of solitude.

Avowed work, even when uncongenial, is far less trying to patience than feigned pleasure.

Culture is like wealth; it makes us more ourselves, it enables us to express ourselves

All that we have read and learned, all that has occupied and interested us in the thoughts and deeds of men abler or wiser than ourselves, constitutes at last a spiritual society of which we can never be deprived, for it rests in the heart and soul of the man who has acquired it.

Unless a man works he cannot find out what he is able to do.