Reflection makes men cowards.
As a general rule, those who are dissatisfied with themselves will seek to go out of themselves into an ideal world. Persons in strong health and spirits, who take plenty of air and exercise, who are "in favor with, their stars," and have a thorough relish of the good things of this life, seldom devote themselves in despair to religion or the muses. Sedentary, nervous, hypochondriacal people, on the contrary, are forced, for want of an appetite for the real and substantial, to look out for a more airy food and speculative comforts.
Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.
To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.
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.
...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.
The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.
The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.
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.
The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.
We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.
We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
I maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding between people of education and without it - between those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power.
It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.
The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.
We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
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.
Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.
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.
The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.
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