It is vain to keep a secret from one who has a right to know it. It will tell itself.

If you want to be great and successful, choose people who are great and successful and walk side by side with them.

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.

The lover is made happier by his love than the object of his affection.

But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow, and notlead the character and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it.