What difference does it make, after all, what your position in life is if you dislike it yourself?

We must take care to live not merely a long life, but a full one; for living a long life requires only good fortune, but living a full life requires character. Long is the life that is fully lived; it is fulfilled only when the mind supplies its own good qualities and empowers itself from within.

All my life I have been seeking to climb out of the pit of my besetting sins and I cannot do it and I never will unless a hand is let down to draw me up.

Haste trips up its own heels, fetters and stops itself.

Do you desire not to be angry? Be not inquisitive. He who inquires what is said of him only works out his own misery.

The great blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and, like people in the dark, we fall foul upon the very thing we search for, without finding it.

It is not poverty that we praise, it is the man whom poverty cannot humble or bend.