We are fonder of visiting our friends in health than in sickness. We judge less favorably of their characters when any misfortune happens to them; and a lucky hit, either in business or reputation, improves even their personal appearance in our eyes.
The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.
It is only necessary to raise a bugbear before the English imagination in order to govern it at will. Whatever they hate or fear, they implicitly believe in, merely from the scope it gives to these passions.
Those who are pleased with the fewest things know the least, as those who are pleased with everything know nothing.
In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason. If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.
We are governed by sympathy; and the extent of our sympathy is determined by that of our sensibility
Those only deserve a monument who do not need one.
The expression of a gentleman's face is not so much that of refinement, as of flexibility, not of sensibility and enthusiasm as of indifference; it argues presence of mind rather than enlargement of ideas.
People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.
A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.
I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.
Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.
I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.
No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.
No truly great person ever thought themselves so.
With women, the great business of life is love; and they generally make a mistake in it. They consult neither the heart nor the head, but are led away by mere humour and fancy. If instead of a companion for life, they had to choose a partner in a country-dance or to trifle away an hour with, their mode of calculation would be right. They tie their true-lover's knot with idle, thoughtless haste, while the institutions of society render it indissoluble.
Learning is its own exceeding great reward.
Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.
He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing; but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.
No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
Abuse is an indirect species of homage.
Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.
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