Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.
Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.
The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right.
We often choose a friend as we do a mistress – for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.
Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.
The most learned are often the most narrow minded.
The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.
The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.
The incentive to ambition is the love of power.
The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.
The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favor.
The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.
There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
Some one is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke.
Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.