Finesse is the best adaptation of means to circumstances.
It is possible to be below flattery as well as above it. One who trusts nobody will not trust sycophants. One who does not value real glory will not value its counterfeit.
Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses.
To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.
The good-humor of a man elated with success often displays itself towards enemies.
Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.
Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.
All the walks of literature are infested with mendicants for fame, who attempt to excite our interest by exhibiting all the distortions of their intellects and stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings.
How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.
I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely democratic government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilisation would perish; or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish.
The hearts of men are their books; events are their tutors; great actions are their eloquence.
No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men.
In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.
Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second.
In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals.
This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.
Beards in olden times, were the emblems of wisdom and piety.
Every sect clamors for toleration when it is down.
Boswell is the first of biographers.
The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.