As no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints.
Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.
Sturdy beggars can bear stout denials.
Our actions must clothe us with an immortality loathsome or glorious.
There are prating coxcombs in the world who would rather talk than listen, although Shakespeare himself were the orator, and human nature the theme!
That cowardice is incorrigible which the love of power cannot overcome.
Butler compared the tongues of these eternal talkers to race-horses, which go the faster the less weight they carry.
Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow; but the misfortune is that in this particular case, the substance belongs to the shadow, the emptiness to its cause.
The acquirements of science maybe termed the armor of the mind.
The awkwardness and embarrassment which all feel on beginning to write, when they themselves are the theme, ought to serve as a hint to author's that self is a subject they ought very rarely to descant upon.
We should not be too niggardly in our praise, for men will do more to support a character than to raise one.
Physicians must discover the weaknesses of the human mind, and even condescend to humor them, or they will never be called in to cure the infirmities of the body.
A power above all human responsibility ought to be above all human attainment.
Women do not transgress the bounds of decorum so often as men; but when they do, they go greater lengths.
God will excuse our prayers for ourselves whenever we are prevented from them by being occupied in such good works as to entitle us to the prayers of others.
Pride differs in many things from vanity, and by gradations that never blend, although they may be somewhat indistinguishable. Pride may perhaps be termed a too high opinion of ourselves founded on the overrating of certain qualities that we do actually possess; whereas vanity is more easily satisfied, and can extract a feeling of self-complacency from qualifications that are imaginary.
Diffidence is the better part of knowledge.
It is with honesty in one particular as with wealth,--those that have the thing care less about the credit of it than those who have it not. No poor man can well afford to be thought so, and the less of honesty a finished rogue possesses the less he can afford to be supposed to want it.
The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy; many a speech to a sentence; and many a folio to a primer.
We may anticipate bliss, but who ever drank of that enchanted cup unalloved?
That is true beauty which has not only a substance, but a spirit; a beauty that we must intimately know, justly to appreciate.
It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.
Women who are the least bashful are not unfrequently the most modest; and we are never more deceived than when we would infer any laxity of principle from that freedom of demeanor which often arises from a total ignorance of vice.
If merited, no courage can stand against its just indignation.
Discretion has been termed the better part of valour, and it is more certain, that diffidence is the better part of knowledge.
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