I had rather never receive a kindness than never bestow one.

The deep waters of time will flow over us: only a few men of genius will lift a head above the surface, and though doomed eventually to pass into the same silence, will fight against oblivion and for a long time hold their own.

The evil which assails us is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves.

In war there is no prize for runner-up.

As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the mind without culture can never produce good fruit

Men can be divided into 2 groups: one that goes ahead and achieves something, and one that comes after and criticizes.

...the geometrician teaches me how to work out the size of my estates rather than how to work out how much a man needs in order to have enough....You geometers can calculate the area of circles, can reduce any given shape to a square, can state the distances separating starts. Nothing's outside your scope when it comes to measurement. Well, if you're such an expert, measure a man's soul; tell me how large or how small that is. You can define a straight line; what use is that to you if you've no idea what straightness means in life?