We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.
Liberty is the only true riches: of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.
The discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetness and cement of friendship.
Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.
Prejudice is never easy unless it can pass itself off for reason.
What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.
Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.
Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.
No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.
The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.
A thought must tell at once, or not at all.
We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.
He who is as faithful to his principles as he is to himself is the true partisan.
Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs.
True friendship is self-love at second-hand.
From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.
He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.
Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.