The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions.

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.

The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief in denying them.

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.