The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.
People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.
Who likes not his business, his business likes not him.
A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.
The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
Experience makes us wise.
He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.
By retaliating our sufferings on the heads of those we love, we get rid of a present uneasiness and incur lasting remorse. With the accomplishment of our revenge our fondness returns; so that we feel the injury we have done them, even more than they do.
To be forward to praise others implies either great eminence, that can afford to, part with applause; or great quickness of discernment, with confidence in our own judgments; or great sincerity and love of truth, getting the better of our self-love.
Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.
The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others; or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.
Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken
One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.
A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.
Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs. The heaviest charge we can bring against the general texture of society is that it is commonplace. Our fancied superiority to others is in some one thing which we think most of because we excel in it, or have paid most attention to it; whilst we overlook their superiority to us in something else which they set equal and exclusive store by.
True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves - neither more nor less.
The love of fame is too high and delicate a feeling in the mind to be mixed up with realities, it is a solitary abstraction. * * * A name "fast anchored in the deep abyss of time" is like a star twinkling in the firmament, cold, silent, distant, but eternal and sublime; and our transmitting one to posterity is as if we should contemplate our translation to the skies.
In exploring new and doubtful tracts of speculation, the mind strikes out true and original views; as a drop of water hesitates at first what direction it will take, but afterwards follows its own course.
The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.
The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot.
That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.
This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.
We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.
We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
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