“If we could be satisfied with anything, we should have been satisfied long ago.”

“We should conduct ourselves not as if we ought to live for the body, but as if we could not live without it. Our too great love for it makes us restless with fears, burdens us with cares, and exposes us to insults.”

“Soft living imposes on us the penalty of debility; we cease to be able to do the things we've long been grudging about doing.”

“It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. ... The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.”

“We should every night call ourselves to an account; What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed? What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired? Our vices will abort of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.”

“If i had not been admitted to these studies it would not have been worth while to have been born.”

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”