But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

The soul is not born; it does not die; it was not produced from anyone… Unborn, eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man's friends are his magnetisms.

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.

Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.