Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.
The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.
That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.
I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter, we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.
Pride is founded not on the sense of happiness, but on the sense of power.
To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said.
Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.
There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.
The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.
A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.
Dandyism is a species of genius.
The affected modesty of most women is a decoy for the generous, the delicate, and unsuspecting; while the artful, the bold, and unfeeling either see or break through its slender disguises.
The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults reconcile us to their virtues.
If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.
Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right.
To the proud the slightest repulse or disappointment is the last indignity.
When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.