Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.
It is better to drink of deep grief than to taste shallow pleasures.
We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received.
Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.
The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.
The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.
Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.
Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.
To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.
Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.
It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play.
Comedy naturally wears itself out – destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.
No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.
A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.
Knowledge is pleasure as well as power.
Silence is one great art of conversation.
If our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little note of them as the dial does of those that are clouded.
Genius is a native to the soil where it grows – is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun; and is not a hothouse plant or an exotic.
They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
When one can do better than everyone else in the same walk, one does not make any very painful exertions to outdo oneself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends.