I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.

If we shall take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

Truth is too simple for us: we do not like those who unmask our illusions.

Every man is as lazy as he dares to be.

Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome.

The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, reallyshow very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves.