There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.
The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion.
Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great.
Remedy your deficiencies,and your merits will take care of themselves.
Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.
As a general rule, people who flagrantly pretend to anything are the reverse of that which they pretend to. A man who sets up for a saint is sure to be a sinner; and a man who boasts that he is a sinner is sure to have some feeble, maudlin, snivelling bit of saintship about him which is enough to make him a humbug.
The cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.
What is past is past, there is a future left to all men, who have the virtue to repent and the energy to atone.
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought.
The man who has acquired the habit of study, though for only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to see the way he has made at the end of a twelvemonth.
Better than fame is still the wish for fame, the constant training for a glorious strife.
A man of genius is inexhaustible only in proportion as he is always renourishing his genius.
We tell our triumphs to the crowds, but our own hearts are the sole confidants of our sorrows.
He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.
Business first, then pleasure.
Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.
It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains.
The secret of fashion is to surprise and never to disappoint.
And, of all the things upon earth, I hold that a faithful friend is the best.
A mind once cultivated will not lie fallow for half an hour.
Love is the business of the idle, but the idleness of the busy.
Love thou rose, yet leave it on its stem.
Happy indeed the poet of whom, like Orpheus, nothing is known but an immortal name! Happy next, perhaps, the poet of whom, like Homer, nothing is known but the immortal works. The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission.
Philosophy, while it soothes the reason, damps the ambition.
We may observe in humorous authors that the faults they chiefly ridicule have often a likeness in themselves. Cervantes had much of the knight-errant in him; Sir George Etherege was unconsciously the Fopling Flutter of his own satire; Goldsmith was the same hero to chambermaids, and coward to ladies that he has immortalized in his charming comedy; and the antiquarian frivolities of Jonathan Oldbuck had their resemblance in Jonathan Oldbuck's creator.
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