No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.

The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.

Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.

The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself.

The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.