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.
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.
True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves - neither more nor less.
Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.
Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that.
One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.
It is better to drink of deep grief than to taste shallow pleasures.
Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them.
Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.
Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.
Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite
A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.
The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.
Those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.
The secret of the difficulties of those people who make a great deal of money, and yet are always in want of it, is this-they throw it away as soon as they get it on the first whim or extravagance that strikes them, and have nothing left to meet ordinary expenses or discharge old debts.
If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.
We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.
As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.
You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.
Faith is necessary to victory.
Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.
The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
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