No change in circumstances can repair a defect of character.

All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view.

Do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more. Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, because we are more our own?

Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well - he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun.

Congratulate yourself if you have broken the monotony of a conventional age

Why should the way I feel depend on the thoughts in someone else's head?

for the hand can never execute any thing higher than the character can inspire.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men.