The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.
Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.
No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.
The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.
A thought must tell at once, or not at all.
We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.
He who is as faithful to his principles as he is to himself is the true partisan.
Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs.
True friendship is self-love at second-hand.
From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.
He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.
Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.
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.