Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.

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

Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.

The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock, and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of.

In every situation do the thing you fear. If you do the thing you fear, the death of fear is certain.