If you wish a general to be beaten, send him a ream full of instructions; if you wish him to succeed, give him a destination, and bid him conquer.
A lawyer’s brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.
It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence.
Few minds are sunlike, sources of light in themselves and to others: many more are moons that shine with a borrowed radiance. One may easily distinguish the two: the former are always full; the latter only now and then, when their suns are shining full upon them.
If Painting be Poetry’s sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets.
Philosophy cannot raise the commonalty up to her level: so, if she is to become popular, she must sink to theirs.
Few are aware that they want any thing, except pounds schillings and pence.
What a type of happy family is the family of the Sun! With what order, with what harmony, with what blessed peace, do his children the planets move around him, shining with light which they drink in from their parent’s in at once upon him and on one another!
When will talkers refrain from evil speaking: when listeners refrain from evil-hearing.
Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.
Some minds are made of blotting-paper: you can write nothing on them distinctly. They swallow the ink, and you find a large spot.
Few take advice, or physic, without wry faces at it.
Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.
The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.
When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it.
We like slipping, but not falling; our real anxiety is to be tempted enough.
What do our clergy lose by reading their sermons? They lose preaching, the preaching of the voice in many cases, the preaching of the eye almost always.
There is a glare about worldly success which is very apt to dazzle men’s eyes.
Some men so dislike the dust kicked up by the generation they belong to, that, being unable to pass, they lag behind it.
Moral prejudices are the stopgaps of virtue; and, as is the case with other stopgaps, it is often more difficult to get either out or in through them than through any other part of the fence.
Temporary madness may be necessary in some cases, to cleanse and renovate the mind; just as a fit of illness is to carry off the humours of the body.