It is curious that some learned dunces, because they can write nonsense in languages that are dead, should despise those that talk sense in languages that are living.
A man's profundity may keep him from opening on a first interview, and his caution on a second; but I should suspect his emptiness, if he carried on his reserve to a third.
Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.
As that gallant can best affect a pretended passion for one woman who has no true love for another, so he that has no real esteem for any of the virtues can best assume the appearance of them all.
It is with nations as with individuals, those who know the least of others think the highest of themselves; for the whole family of pride and ignorance are incestuous, and mutually beget each other.
The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age.
Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship - never.
A wise minister would rather preserve peace than gain a victory, because he knows that even the most successful war leaves nations generally more poor, always more profligate, than it found them.
Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it's set a rolling it must increase.
It is not every man that can afford to wear a shabby coat; and worldly wisdom dictates to her disciples the propriety of dressing somewhat beyond their means, but of living somewhat within them,--for every one, sees how we dress, but none see how we live, except we choose to let them. But the truly great are, by universal suffrage, exempted from these trammels, an may live or dress as they please.
Grant graciously what you cannot refuse safely and conciliate those you cannot conquer.
As the gout seems privileged to attack the bodies of the wealthy, so ennui seems to exert a similar prerogative over their minds.
Happiness ... leads none of us by the same route.
Some philosophers would give a sex to revenge, and appropriate it almost exclusively to the female mind. But, like most other vices, it is of both genders; yet, because wounded vanity and slighted love are the two most powerful excitements to revenge, it has been thought, perhaps, to rage with more violence in the female heart.
Avarice begets more vices than Priam did children and like Priam survives them all. It starves its keeper to surfeit those who wish him dead, and makes him submit to more mortifications to lose heaven than the martyr undergoes to gain it.
By privileges, immunities, or prerogatives to give unlimited swing to the passions of individuals, and then to hope that they will restrain them, is about as reasonable as to expect that the tiger will spare the hart to browse upon the herbage.
In answering an opponent, arrange your ideas, but not your words.
Any one can give advice, such as it is, but only a wise man knows how to profit by it.
An act by which we make one friend and one enemy is a losing game; because revenge is a much stronger principle than gratitude
When we live habitually with the wicked, we become necessarily either their victim or their disciple; when we associate, on the contrary, with virtuous men, we form ourselves in imitation of their virtues, or, at least, lose every day something of our faults.
Extemporaneous and oral harangues will always have this advantage over those that are read from a in manuscript: every burst of eloquence or spark of genius they may contain, however studied they may have been beforehand, will appear to the audience to be the effect of the sudden inspiration of talent.
It is adverse to talent to be consorted and trained up with inferior minds and inferior companions, however high they may rank. The foal of the racer neither finds out his speed nor calls out his powers if pastured out with the common herd, that are destined for the collar and the yoke.
Those that know the least of others think the highest of themselves.
Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.
Patience is the support of weakness; impatience the ruin of strength.
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