You can't touch pitch and not be mucked, lad. - Robert Louis Stevenson

In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.

Already an old man, he [Samuel Johnson] ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea.

To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.