People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.
The expression of a gentleman's face is not so much that of refinement, as of flexibility, not of sensibility and enthusiasm as of indifference; it argues presence of mind rather than enlargement of ideas.
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.
A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.
I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.
Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.
I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.
No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.
No truly great person ever thought themselves so.
With women, the great business of life is love; and they generally make a mistake in it. They consult neither the heart nor the head, but are led away by mere humour and fancy. If instead of a companion for life, they had to choose a partner in a country-dance or to trifle away an hour with, their mode of calculation would be right. They tie their true-lover's knot with idle, thoughtless haste, while the institutions of society render it indissoluble.
Learning is its own exceeding great reward.
Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.
He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing; but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.
No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
Abuse is an indirect species of homage.
Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.
The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.
Envy is the deformed and distorted offspring of egotism; and when we reflect on the strange and disproportioned character of the parent, we cannot wonder at the perversity and waywardness of the child.
The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.
We can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!
Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.
Men of gravity are intellectual stammerers, whose thoughts move slowly.
Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.
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