We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please, that is, as they please or displease us.
If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.
Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.
The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.
We prefer ourselves to others, only because we a have more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person’s.
A man knows his companion in a long journey and a little inn.
We are all of us, more or less, the slaves of opinion.
Good temper is an estate for life.
I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.
Shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of my mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom, with power, because I have been followed with one cry of abuse ever since for not being a Government tool?
I am then never less alone than when alone.
It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.
The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance. They treat everything with contempt which they do not understand.
Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a real confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.
The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.
None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.
The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.