Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.
War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.
Pride is less ashamed of being ignorant, than of being instructed, and she looks too high to find that, which very often lies beneath her.
Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.
There is a diabolical trio existing in the natural man, implacable, inextinguishable, co-operative and consentaneous, pride, envy, and hate; pride that makes us fancy we deserve all the goods that others possess; envy that some should be admired while we are overlooked; and hate, because all that is bestowed on others, diminishes the sum we think due to ourselves.
Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.
Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us - never cease to instruct - never cloy.
The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society's most basic values.
A wise man may be duped as well as a fool; but the fool publishes the triumph of his deceiver; the wise man is silent, and denies that triumph to an enemy which he would hardly concede to a friend; a triumph that proclaims his own defeat.
We often pretend to fear what we really despise, and more often despise what we really fear.
The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age.
Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.
Temperate men drink the most, because they drink the longest.
Is there anything more tedious than the often repeated tales of the old and forgetful?
There is this difference between the two temporal blessings - health and money; money is the most envied, but the least enjoyed; health is the most enjoyed, but the least envied; and this superiority of the latter is still more obvious when we reflec.
To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.
Unlike the sun, intellectual luminaries shine brightest after they set.
Strong as our passions are, they may be starved into submission, and conquered without being killed.
Most plagiarists, like the drone, have neither taste to select, industry to acquire, nor skill to improve, but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared, from the hive.
Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous. A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so, are assorted and arranged.
The victim to too severe a law is considered as a martyr rather than a criminal.
He that places himself neither higher nor lower than he ought to do exercises the truest humility.
All the poets are indebted more or less to those who have gone before them; even Homer's originality has been questioned, and Virgil owes almost as much to Theocritus, in his Pastorals, as to Homer, in his Heroics; and if our own countryman, Milton, has soared above both Homer and Virgil, it is because he has stolen some feathers from their wings.
Honor is unstable and seldom the same; for she feeds upon opinion, and is as fickle as her food.
Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.
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