To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else - these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other cheap and trivial

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked

There is probably no pleasure equal to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp; but it is a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can find pleasure in it

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it- namely, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain

Adam was the only man who, when saying a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes