For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.

Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.

Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property, of a man; like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given.