Deliberate with caution, but act with decision and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness.

True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.

Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straight forward and simple integrity in another.

The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation; as a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum.

The art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and hearers wise enough to read.

None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them; such persons covet secrets as a spendthrift covets money, for the purpose of circulation.

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

Let those who would affect singularity with success first determine to be very virtuous, and they will be sure to be very singular.

Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.

The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.

In the pursuit of knowledge, follow it wherever it is to be found; like fern, it is the produce of all climates, and like coin, its circulation is not restricted to any particular class.

Vital lives are about action. You can't feel warmth unless you create it, can't feel delight until you play, can't know serendipity unless you risk.

My two most unproductive days of the week have always been yesterday and tomorrow. Keeping that in mind, I try to focus majority of my attention on today.

Forged in the fires of human passion, choking on the fumes of human rage, with these out hells and our heavens, so few inches apart, we must be awfully small, and not as strong as we think we are.

If you bear the cross unwillingly you make it a burden and load yourself more heavily but you must bear it.

If we be empty and poor it is not because God's hand is straitened but ours is not opened.

America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation.

Positive attitudes qualify you for positive experiences.

It is good to be attracted out of ourselves, to be forced to take a near view of the sufferings, the privations, the efforts, the difficulties of others.

It's only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of oversmoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate.

I think the way I am on stage is probably who I really am. Everything else is a persona. It's an unedited version of who you are. For me there's something pure about that.