Fate laughs at probabilities

The easiest person to deceive is one’s own self.

There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.

... if the breast be uneducated, the gift may curse the giver; and he who passes at once from the slave to the freeman may pass as rapidly from the freeman to the ruffian.

A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.

Two lives that once part, are as ships that divide When, moment on moment there rushes between The one and the other, a sea,— Ah, never can fall from the days that have been A gleam on the years that shall be.

It is not Wisdom, but Ignorance, which teaches men presumption; Genius may be sometimes arrogant, but nothing is so diffident as Knowledge.