The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

What you persist in doing gets easier. The task hasn't changed, but your ability to do it has increased.

A man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him,Mnot bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club.

[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.

No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.

To be great, you must be misunderstood

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.