There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of the Immortals.
Anyone must be mainly ignorant or thoughtless, who is surprised at everything he sees; or wonderfully conceited who expects everything to conform to his standard of propriety.
In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
Walk groundly, talk profoundly, drink roundly, sleep soundly.
There is nothing good to be had in the country, or if there is, they will not let you have it.
We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.
A man is a hypocrite only when he affects to take a delight in what he does not feel, not because he takes a perverse delight in opposite things.
Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.
A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.
There is a quiet repose and steadiness about the happiness of age, if the life has been well spent. Its feebleness is not painful. The nervous system has lost its acuteness. But, in mature years we feel that a burn, a scald, a cut, is more tolerable than it was in the sensitive period of youth.
Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it.
Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real sentiment; hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and have no wish for.
The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics – mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.
Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.
All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.
You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.
One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.
Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity.
Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.