The sinner sins against himself; the wrongdoer wrongs himself, becoming the worse by his own action.
In everything the ends well defined are the secret of durable success.
All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world.
Ignorance is the primary source of all misery and vice.
The universal and absolute law is that natural justice which cannot be written down, but which appeals to the hearts of all.
When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East--above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe--we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy.
All men have an equal right to the free development of their faculties; they have an equal right to the impartial protection of the state; but it is not true, it is against all the laws of reason and equity, it is against the eternal nature of things, that the indolent man and the laborious man, the spendthrift and the economist, the imprudent and the wise, should obtain and enjoy an equal amount of goods.
I have a winning temperament. I know how to win.
I don't place too much importance on words. It's always the last thing I do because I'm definitely more interested in mood.
Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.
It's easy for us to feel separate from other people and from other forms of life, especially if we don't have a reliable connection to our own inner world. Without insight into our internal cycles of pleasure and pain, desires and fears, there is a strong sense of being removed, apart or disconnected. When we do have an understanding of our inner lives, it provides an intuitive opening, even without words, to the ties that exist between ourselves and others.