We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.
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.
Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust. Hatred alone is immortal.
Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.
No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.
A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.
...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages.
The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way ... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.
Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite
The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
The secret of the difficulties of those people who make a great deal of money, and yet are always in want of it, is this-they throw it away as soon as they get it on the first whim or extravagance that strikes them, and have nothing left to meet ordinary expenses or discharge old debts.
Those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.
Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.
A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.
The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.
We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.
You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.
As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.
Faith is necessary to victory.
Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.
The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
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