By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.

The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.

Give the slave the least elevation of religious sentiment, and he is not slave: you are the slave: he not only in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He is the master.

The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful, if man will live the life of nature, and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers.

To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom.

Morality is the object of government.