If your ultimate and highest goal is to have life made easy and sociable, then never become involved with Christianity, shun it, because it wants the very opposite; it wants to make your life difficult and to do this by making you alone before God. No earnest person, therefore, wearies of tracking down the illusions, because insofar as he is a thinking person he fears most to be in error, however cozy the arrangement is, however good the company—and as a Christian he fears most to be lost without knowing it—however flattering, however splendid the surroundings and the company are. Works of Love

Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. Moby Dick

Our deeds attach themselves to us like the flame to phosphorus. They constitute our brilliance, to be sure, but only in so far as they consume us. Journals

Do not think that what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; but if a thing is humanly possible, consider it to be within your reach. Book VI