The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.
Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols -- it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.
One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.
I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.
There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled. Of all conceits it is surely the most classical. "I count only the hours that are serene.".
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.
The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot.
The wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearning after happiness; and to desire is in some sense to enjoy.
In exploring new and doubtful tracts of speculation, the mind strikes out true and original views; as a drop of water hesitates at first what direction it will take, but afterwards follows its own course.
The assumption of merit is easier, less embarrassing, and more effectual than the actual attainment of it.
Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.
What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.
He is a hypocrite who professes what he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or approves.
Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.
Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.
It is better to drink of deep grief than to taste shallow pleasures.
Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.
Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs. The heaviest charge we can bring against the general texture of society is that it is commonplace. Our fancied superiority to others is in some one thing which we think most of because we excel in it, or have paid most attention to it; whilst we overlook their superiority to us in something else which they set equal and exclusive store by.
True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves - neither more nor less.
The vain man makes a merit of misfortune, and triumphs in his disgrace.
This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.
The incentive to ambition is the love of power.
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