When a man becomes a conformist, he is sacrificing the richness of independent thinking.

It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.

Every individual strives to grow and exclude, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every other creature.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.

No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken.

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.