Vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

To be gret is to be misunderstood.

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.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.