"My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them."
"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."
"Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good."
"Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature. Never is life so low or so little as when occupied with the present."
"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."
"Be always displeased at what thou art, if thou desire to attain to what thou art not; for where thou hast pleased thyself, there thou abidest."
"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."