Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and...it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path.... He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it.

Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.

The finest wits have their sediment.

Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct; that every honour is desert; that every effort is an insolence of your own?...You carry your fortune in your own hand.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?