Though love and hatred are as opposites as fire and water, yet do they sometimes subsist in the breast together towards the same person; nay by their very opposition and desire to destroy each other, are they strengthened and increased.
It by no means follows, that because two men utter the same words, they have precisely the same idea which they mean to express: language is inadequate to the variety of ideas which are conceived by different minds, and which, could they be expressed, would produce a new variety of characteristic differences between man and man.
We are not slow at discovering the selfishness of others; for this plain reason--because it clashes with our own.
Men often prove the violence of their own prejudices, even by the violence with which they attack the prejudices of other people.
Habit is the cement of society, the comfort of life, and, alas! The root of error.
O wearisome condition of humanity! Born under one law, to another bound; Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity; Created sick, commanded to be sound.
Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not also the only one that deserves to be laughed at?
The criterion of true beauty is that it increases on examination; if false, that it lessens.
There is scarce any passion so heartily decried by moralists and satirists, as AMBITION; and yet, methinks, ambition is not a vice but in a vicious mind: in a virtuous mind it is a virtue, and will be found to take its color from the character in which it is mixed. Ambition is a desire of superiority; and a man may become superior, either by making others less or himself greater.
Politics is the food of sense exposed to the hunger of folly.
Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them.
No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself.
How happy is it for us, that the admiration of others should depend so much more on their ignorance than our perfection!
Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.
Two men are equally free from the rage of ambition; are they therefore equal in merit? Perhaps not; one may be above ambition, the other below it.
Man is said to be a rational creature; but should it not rather be said, that man is a creature capable of being rational, as we say a parrot is a creature capable of speech?
Though beauty is, with the most apt similitude, I had almost said with the most literal truth, called a flower that fades and dies almost in the very moment of its maturity; yet there is, methinks, a kind of beauty which lives even to old age; a beauty that is not in the features, but, if I may be allowed the expression, shines through them. As it is not merely corporeal it is not the object of mere sense, nor is it to be discovered but by persons of true taste and refined sentiment.
Every character is in some respects uniform, and in others inconsistent; and it is only by the study both of the uniformity and inconsistency, and a comparison of them with each other, that the knowledge of man is acquired.
How seldom is generosity perfect and pure! How often do men give because it throws a certain inferiority on those who receive, and superiority on themselves!
Fire and people do in this agree,They both good servants, both ill masters be.
Genius always looks forward, and not only sees what is, but what necessarily will be.
Taste may be compared to that exquisite sense of the bee, which instantly discovers and extracts the quintessence of every flower, and disregards all the rest of it.
One great reason why men practice generosity so little in the world, is, their finding so little there: generosity is catching; and if so many men escape it, it is in a great degree from the same reason that country-men escape the smallpox, because they meet no one to give it to them.
The greatest slave in a kingdom is generally the king of it.
There are sometimes beauties in a character which would never have appeared but for a defect, and defects which would never have appeared but for a beauty.
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