"My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them."

"Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce."

"Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked."

"We think that we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love."

"There is no easy path leading out of life, and few easy ones that lie within it."

"A solitude is the audience-chamber of God."

"Ambition has but one reward for all: A little power, a little transient fame; A grave to rest in, and a fading name!"

"Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws."

"Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who think differently from him."

"We talk on principal, but act on motivation."

"Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature."

"People, like nails, lose their effectiveness when they lose direction and begin to bend."

"In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always."

"The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour."

"We often fancy that we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love."

"A man's vanity tells him what is honor, a man's conscience what is justice."

"Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good."

"The flame of anger, bright and brief, sharpens the barb of love."

"Delay in justice is injustice."

"Consult duty not events."

"Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age."

"Music is God's gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven."

"The Siren waits thee, singing song for song."

"Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much."

"There is delight in singing, though none hear beside the singer."

"There is nothing on earth divine except humanity."

"Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in excess."

"I strove with none; for none was worth my strife."

"An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof."

"Great men always pay deference to greater."

"The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander."

"Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend."

"Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose."