All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.

The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter. Everyone who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks.

Make up your mind to be happy.

The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die.

To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.

A great part of this life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.