There is no flattery so adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent.
We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.
A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.
It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, anymore than they grow stronger or healthier or honest.
Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.
Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.
Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.
What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.
Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.
The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.
A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death.
Learning is its own exceeding great reward.
One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it.
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.