Heat is in proportion to the want of true knowledge.
Learning is the dictionary, but sense the grammar of science.
Human nature is the same in all professions.
Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?
Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world – though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst – the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!
I’ll not hurt thee, says Uncle Toby, rising with the fly in his hand. Go, he says, opening the window to let it escape. Why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me.
There are a thousand unnoticed openings, continued my father, which let penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul; and I maintain it, added he, that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room, – or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.
To write a book is for all the world like humming a song – be but in tune with yourself, madam, ’tis no matter how high or how low you take it.
There is nothing so awkward as courting a woman whilst she is making sausages.
A coward never forgives.
Pain and pleasure, like light and darkness, succeed each other; and he only who knows how to accommodate himself to their returns, and can wisely extract the good from the evil, knows how to live.
The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.
All womankind, from the highest to the lowest love jokes; the difficulty is to know how they choose to have them cut; and there is no knowing that, but by trying, as we do with our artillery in the field, by raising or letting down their breeches, till we hit the mark.
Go, poor devil, get thee gone! Why should I hurt thee? This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.
The improbability of a malicious story serves but to help forward the currency of it, because it increases the scandal. So that, in such instances, the world is like the pious St. Austin, who said he believed some things because they were absurd and impossible.
There is no such thing as real happiness in life. The justest definition that was ever given of it was “a tranquil acquiescence under an agreeable delusion” – I forget where.
Before an affliction is digested, consolation ever comes too soon; and after it is digested, it comes too late.
The director is responsible for interpreting the playwright’s work through the cast with the help of the staff. It is the director’s artistic concept of the play that the cast, staff, and crew work to obtain.
To write a book is for all the world like humming a song.
Positiveness is a most absurd foible. If you are in the right, it lessens your triumph; if in the wrong, it adds shame to your defeat.