Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental guardian and legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.
Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.
Nothing is such an enemy to accuracy of judgment as a coarse discrimination; a want of such classification and distribution as the subject admits of.
In these meetings of all sorts, every counsel, in proportion as it is daring and violent and perfidious, is taken for the mark of superior genius. Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. Tenderness to individuals is considered as treason to the public.
The worst of these politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions. But.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
There is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.
Never, no never, did Nature say one thing, and wisdom another.
Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.
People must be taken as they are, and we should never try make them or ourselves better by quarreling with them.
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis.
All men have equal rights, but not to equal things.
Good order is the foundation of all things.
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.
Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.
Manners are of more importance than laws. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe.