One way in which fools succeed where wise men fail is that through ignorance of the danger they sometimes go coolly about a hazardous business.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
The Eastern monarch who proclaimed a reward to him who should discover a new pleasure, would have deserved well of mankind had he stipulated that it should be blameless.
Anger requires that the offender should not only be made to grieve in his turn, but to grieve for that particular wrong which has been done by him.
Fancy, when once brought into religion, knows not where to stop. It is like one of those fiends in old stories which any one could raise, but which, when raised, could never be kept within the magic circle.
It may be said, almost without qualification, that true wisdom consists in the ready and accurate perception of analogies. Without the former quality, knowledge of the past is unobstructive: without the latter it is deceptive.
Happiness is no laughing matter.
Man is naturally more desirous of a quiet and approving, than of a vigilant and tender conscience--more desirous of security than of safety.
A certain class of novels may with propriety be called fables.
Nothing but the right can ever be expedient, since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a great good to a less.
Of all hostile feelings, envy is perhaps the hardest to be subdued, because hardly any one owns it even to himself, but looks out for one pretext after another to justify his hostility.
Eloquence is relative. One can no more pronounce on the eloquence of any composition than the wholesomeness of a medicine, without knowing for whom it is intended.
When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigorous despotism.
It is folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do.
The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it.
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