A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.

No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.

The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?

With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.