Who aspires to remain leader must keep in advance of his column. His fear must not play traitor to his occasions. The instant he falls into line with his followers, a bolder spirit may throw himself at the head of the movement initiated, and in that moment his leadership is gone.
Hard workers are usually honest; industry lifts them above temptation.
The loss of a beloved connection awakens an interest in Heaven before unfelt.
If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.
Ambition, in one respect, is like a singer's voice; pitched at too high a key, it breaks and comes to nothing.
One must have been, at some time or other, in a situation where a small sum was as necessary almost as life itself, with no more ability to raise it than to raise the dead, before he can fully appreciate the value of money.
A peculiar work in any art must not be too hastily judged. New styles have to create new tastes.
In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose--one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it.
A particular disappointment is seldom more than an excrescence upon the trunk of a general good--a shower that spoils the pleasure party, but refreshes and enriches the earth.
There are some weaknesses that are peculiar and distinctive to generous characters, as freckles are to a fair skin.
A mother's love is indeed the golden link that binds youth to age; and he is still but a child, however time may have furrowed his cheek, or silvered his brow, who can yet recall, with a softened heart, the fond devotion, or the gentle chidings, of the best friend that God gives us.
It is one of the arts of a great beauty to heighten the effect of her charms by affecting to be sweetly unconscious of them.
Beauty can afford to laugh at distinctions: it is itself the greatest distinction.
The legitimate aim of criticism is to direct attention to the excellent. The bad will dig its own grave.
No work deserves to be criticized that has not much in it that deserves to be applauded.
The method of the critic is to balance praises with censure, and thus to do justice to the subject and--his own discrimination.
The very cunning conceal their cunning; the indifferently shrewd boast of it.
The worst deluded are the self-deluded.
The natural wants are few, and easily gratified: it is only those which are artificial that perplex us by their multiplicity.
When we have the means to pay for what we desire, what we get is not so much what is best, as what is costliest.
The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.
An ambition to excel in petty things obstructs the progress to nobler aims.
In a contest with a weaker party it is more honorable to yield than to force concession. Magnanimity becomes the strong.
Resentments, carried too far, expose us to a fate analogous to that of the fish-hawk, when he strikes his talons too deep into a fish beyond his capacity to lift, and is carried under and drowned by it.
Affliction, like the iron-smith, shapes as it smites.
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