The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.
It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism – despotism during the campaign – is indispensable.
The real essence of work is concentrated energy – people who really have that in a superior degree by nature are independent of the forms and habits and artifices by which less able and less active people are kept up to their labors.
Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
Business is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply. But it does not look as if it did.
The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good Bank.
The real essence of work is concentrated energy.
What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights – the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others.
The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created.
The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.
The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.
A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.
Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.