We all wish to be of importance in one way or another. The child coughs with might and main, since it has no other claim on the company.

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

It is better to be a thorn in the side of a friend than an echo.

Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.

Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality.

Self-trust is the first secret of success.