We do not attend to the advice of the sage and experienced because we think they are old, forgetting that they once were young and placed in the same situations as ourselves.
The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant – without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others – and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.
Our contempt for others proves nothing but the illiberality and narrowness of our own views.
While we desire, we do not enjoy; and with enjoyment desire ceases.
An honest man is respected by all parties.
Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe; so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.
Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an appetite for one’s dinner, as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by riding over Banstead Downs.
You are never tired of painting, because you have to set down not what you know already, but what you have just discovered.
Whatever excites the spirit of contradiction is capable of producing the last effects of heroism; which is only the highest pitch of obstinacy, in a good or bad cause, in wisdom or folly.
Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy.
The public is so in awe of its own opinion that it never dares to form any, but catches up the first idle rumour, lest it should be behindhand in its judgment, and echoes it till it is deafened with the sound of its own voice.
Poverty, labor, and calamity are not without their luxuries, which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate in vain seek for.
Keep your misfortunes to yourself.
People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy’s sake.
One said he wondered that leather was not dearer than any other thing. Being demanded a reason: because, saith he, it is more stood upon than any other thing in the world.
The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.
Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others, who feel that the world has done them justice.
In exploring new and doubtful tracts of speculation, the mind strikes out true and original views; as a drop of water hesitates at first what direction it will take, but afterwards follows its own course.
Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers.
Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols – it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.