Opinions, like showers, are generated in high places, but they invariably descend into lower ones, and ultimately flow down to the people as rain unto the sea.
If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.
If a horse has four legs, and I’m riding it, I think I can win.
Moderation is the inseparable companion of wisdom, but with it genius has not even a nodding acquaintance.
No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.
The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later.
To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.
Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.
Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.
In religion as in politics it so happens that we have less charity for those who believe half our creed, than for those who deny the whole of it.
It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends.
Many speak the truth when they say that they despise riches, but they mean the riches possessed by others.
Mystery is not profoundness.
Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable.
Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.
Patience is the support of weakness; impatience the ruin of strength.
The greatest friend of truth is Time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice, and her constant companion is Humility.
I’m aiming by the time I’m fifty to stop being an adolescent.
Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.