I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped.

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

Don't ever give up on something or someone that you can't go a full day without thinking about.

O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas.

Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.

The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.