The finest achievement for a man of thought is to have fathomed what may be fathomed, and quietly to revere the unfathomable.
There are two things of which a man cannot be careful enough: of obstinacy, if he confines himself to his own line of thought; of incompetency, if he goes beyond it.
The century advances; but every individual begins anew.
What friends do with us and for us is a real part of our life; for it strengthens and advances our personality. The assault of our enemies is not part of our life; it is only part of our experience; we throw it off and guard ourselves against it as against frost, storm, rain, hail or any other of the external evils which may be expected to happen.
A man cannot live with every one, and therefore he cannot live for every one. To see this truth aright is to place a high value upon one's friends, and not to hate or persecute one's enemies. Nay, there is hardly any greater advantage for a man to gain than to find out, if he can, the merits of his opponents: it gives him a decided ascendency over them.
Every one knows how to value what he has attained in life; most of all the man who thinks and reflects in his old age. He has a comfortable feeling that it is something of which no one can rob him.
The best metempsychosis is for us to appear again in others.
It is very seldom that we satisfy ourselves; all the more consoling is it to have satisfied others.
We look back upon our life only as on a thing of broken pieces, because our misses and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have done and attained.
Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp—powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.