A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.

Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

A person with a clear purpose will make progress, even on the roughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress, even on the smoothest road.

In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.

He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.

The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning.