If you want to be great and successful, choose people who are great and successful and walk side by side with them.

Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much.

If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda-these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.