In ourselves our safety must be sought.
By our own right hand it must be wrought.

Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.

Virtue? A fig! 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.

One's life is peculiarly one's own when one has invented it.

Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.

It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.

self-preservation is the primary and only foundation of virtue.

Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

We try to make a virtue of vices we are loth to correct.

An essential virtue is humility. … The principle of humility and prayer leads one to feel a need of divine guidance. Self-reliance is a virtue, but with it should go a consciousness of the need of superior help — a consciousness that as you walk firmly in the pathway of duty, there is a possibility of your making a misstep; and with that consciousness is a prayer, a pleading that God will inspire you to avoid that false step

We must be our own before we can be another's.

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue.

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.