The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.
I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.
The soil of friendship is worn out with constant use. Habit may still attach us to each other, but we feel ourselves fettered by it. Old friends might be compared to old married people without the tie of children.
He is a hypocrite who professes what he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or approves.
Natural affection is a prejudice; for though we have cause to love our nearest connections better than others, we have no reason to think them better than others.
The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?
The youth is better than the old age of friendship.
We dread life’s termination as the close, not of enjoyment, but of hope.
The assumption of merit is easier, less embarrassing, and more effectual than the actual attainment of it.
Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement; it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.
The wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearning after happiness; and to desire is in some sense to enjoy.
As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.
Life is the art of being well deceived.
We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.
A proud man is satisfied with his own good opinion, and does not seek to make converts to it.
People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.
General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.
A woman’s vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the god of her idolatry.