Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

The world is his who can see through its pretension.

There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

A man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it.

But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.

A Frenchman may possibly be clean; an Englishman is conscientiously clean.