To make extensive preparations for life--no matter what form they may take--is one of the greatest and commonest of follies. Such preparations presuppose, in the first place, a long life, the full and complete term of years appointed to man--and how few reach it! and even if it be reached, it is still too short for all the plans that have been made

With by far the largest number of learned men, knowledge is a means, not an end. That is why they will never achieve any great work; because, to do that, he who pursues knowledge must pursue it as an end, and treat everything else, even existence itself, as only a means. For everything which a man fails to pursue for its own sake is but half-pursue

They pique themselves upon knowing about everything--stones, plants, battles, experiments, and all the books in existence. It never occurs to them that information is only a means of insight, and in itself of little or no value; that it is his way of thinking that makes a man a philosopher.

SHORT DIALOGUE ON THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF OUR TRUE BEING BY DEATH.

as Seneca says, to submit yourself to reason is the way to make everything else submit to you--si tibi vis omnia subjicere, te subjice rationi.

"Life is a difficult question; I have decided to spend my life in thinking about it."

But although the number of those authors who really and seriously think before they write is small, only extremely few of them think about the subject itself; the rest think only about the books written on this subject, and what has been said by others upon it, I mean. In order to think, they must have the more direct and powerful incentive of othe

The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower is it in reaching maturity.

The advice here given is on a par with a rule recommended by Pythagoras,--to review, every night before going to sleep, what we have done during the day. To live at random, in the hurly-burly of business or pleasure, without ever reflecting upon the past,--to go on, as it were, pulling cotton off the reel of life,--is to have no clear idea of what