Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust. Hatred alone is immortal.
In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.
The world dread nothing so much as being convinced of their errors.
The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.
The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time.
There is no flattery so adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent.
By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to despise ourselves.
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.