Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.
Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.
As a general rule, those who are dissatisfied with themselves will seek to go out of themselves into an ideal world. Persons in strong health and spirits, who take plenty of air and exercise, who are "in favor with, their stars," and have a thorough relish of the good things of this life, seldom devote themselves in despair to religion or the muses. Sedentary, nervous, hypochondriacal people, on the contrary, are forced, for want of an appetite for the real and substantial, to look out for a more airy food and speculative comforts.
Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that.
True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves - neither more nor less.
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. The heaviest charge we can bring against the general texture of society is that it is commonplace. Our fancied superiority to others is in some one thing which we think most of because we excel in it, or have paid most attention to it; whilst we overlook their superiority to us in something else which they set equal and exclusive store by.
To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.
In exploring new and doubtful tracts of speculation, the mind strikes out true and original views; as a drop of water hesitates at first what direction it will take, but afterwards follows its own course.
Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.
The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.
That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.
The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.
We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.
We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.
The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.
The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
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 imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.
Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.
We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.
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!
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