If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.
It is not uncommon to charge the difference between promise and performance, between profession and reality, upon deep design and studied deceit; but the truth is, that there is very little hypocrisy in the world.
Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop.
Books without the knowledge of life are useless.
He was so generally civil, that nobody thanked him for it.
I would advise no man to marry who is not likely to propagate understanding.
There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.
In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.
No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.
If the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.
When female minds are embittered by age or solitude, their malignity is generally exerted in a rigorous and spiteful superintendence of domestic trifles.
That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind; not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both.
As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs, so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas.
The most Heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.
It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.
Our desires always increase with our possessions. The knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.
You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as the recompense of their labor, than when you give money merely in charity.
God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I?
Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.
Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.