Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition.
Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume.
Restraint and discipline and examples of virtue and justice. These are the things that form the education of the world.
I find along with many virtues in my countrymen there is a jealousy, a soreness, and readiness to take offence, as if they were the most helpless and impotent of mankind, and yet a violence... and a boistrousness in their resentment, as if they had been puffed up with the highest prosperity and power. they will not only be served, but it must also be in their own way and on their own principles and even in words and language that they liked... which renders it very difficult for a plain unguarded man as I am to have anything to do with them or their affairs.
Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.
Though ugliness be the opposite of beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion and fitness; for it is possible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions, and with a perfect fitness for any use.
Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.
Nothing ought to be more weighed than the nature of books recommended by public authority. So recommended, they soon form the character of the age.
That cardinal virtue, temperance.
Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.
To drive men from independence to live on alms, is itself great cruelty.
I dread our own power, and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded... We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing, and hitherto unheard-of-power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.
Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.
By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.
The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.
Beauty is the promise of happiness.
As to great and commanding talents, they are the gift of Providence in some way unknown to us, they rise where they are least expected; they fail when everything seems disposed to produce them, or at least to call them forth.
Unsociable humors are contracted in solitude, which will, in the end, not fail of corrupting the understanding as well as the manners, and of utterly disqualifying a man for the satisfactions and duties of life. Men must be taken as they are, and we neither make them or ourselves better by flying from or quarreling with them.
Society is indeed a contract. ... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.
England and Ireland may flourish together. The world is large enough for both of us. Let it be our care not to make ourselves too little for it.
In their nomination to office they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function.
It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.
No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.
He that borrows the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own; he that uses that of a superior elevates his own to the stature of that he contemplates.
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