Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.
In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.
The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way ... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.
To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.
...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.
No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.
Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.
There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled. Of all conceits it is surely the most classical. "I count only the hours that are serene.".
I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.
Reflection makes men cowards.
The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.
What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.
The assumption of merit is easier, less embarrassing, and more effectual than the actual attainment of it.
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.
It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
The wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearning after happiness; and to desire is in some sense to enjoy.
Natural affection is a prejudice; for though we have cause to love our nearest connections better than others, we have no reason to think them better than others.
We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it.
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!
We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.
This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.
He is a hypocrite who professes what he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or approves.
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