Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.
Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.
Death is the greatest evil, because it cuts off hope.
We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives to speak a language correctly or idiomatically.
We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.
We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.
The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.
The world has been doing little else but playing at make-believe all its lifetime.
The “olden times” are only such in reference to us. The past is rendered strange, mysterious, visionary, awful from this great gap in time that parts us from it, and the long perspective of waning years. Things gone by and almost forgotten, look dim and dull, uncouth and quaint, from our ignorance of them, and the mutability of customs. But in their day – they were fresh, unimpaired, in full vigour, familiar and glossy.
Reading is perhaps the greatest pleasure you will have in life; the one you will think of longest, and repent of least.
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
Good-nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.
The florid style is the reverse of the familiar. The last is employed as an unvarnished medium to convey ideas; the first is resorted to as a spangled veil to conceal the want of them. When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them fine.
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less lone than when alone... I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country... I like solitude, when I give myself up to it, for the sake of solitude...
The path of genius is free, and its own.
The soul of conversation is sympathy.
The time we lose is not in overdoing what we are about, but in doing nothing.
The perceiving our own weaknesses enables us to give others excellent advice, but it does not teach us to to reform ourselves.
Repose is necessary to great efforts, and he who is never idle, labours in vain!
He who has a contempt for poetry cannot have much respect for himself or for anything else.
Man is, so to speak, an endless and infinitely varied repetition: and if we know what one man feels, we so far know what a thousand feel in the sanctuary of their being. Our feeling of general humanity is at once an aggregate of a thousand different truths, and it is also the same truth a thousand times told.