The incentive to ambition is the love of power.

Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.

Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith's bellows: they take breath but are not alive.

Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols -- it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.

No really great man ever thought himself so.

Books wind into the heart.

A woman's vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the god of her idolatry.