Self-denial is often the sacrifice of one sort of self-love for another.
It is astonishing how much more people are interested in lengthening life than improving it.
Let us not be too prodigal when we are young, nor too parsimonious when we are old. Otherwise we shall fall into the common error of those, who, when they had the power to enjoy, had not the prudence to acquire; and when they had the prudence to acquire, had no longer the power to enjoy.
No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.
Where true religion has prevented one crime, false religions have afforded a pretext for a thousand.
War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.
Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.
I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.
The wise man has his follies, no less than the fool; but it has been said that herein lies the difference--the follies of the fool are known to the world, but hidden from himself; the follies of the wise are known to himself, but hidden from the world.
To know a man, observe how he wins his object, rather than how he loses it; for when we fail, our pride supports us - when we succeed, it betrays us.
Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.
It is the briefest yet wisest maxim which tells us to meddle not.
Time, the cradle of hope, but the grave of ambition, is the stern corrector of fools, but the salutary counselor of the wise, bringing all they dread to the one, and all they desire to the other.
The victims of ennui paralyze all the grosser feelings by excess, and torpify all the finer by disuse and inactivity. Disgusted with this world, and indifferent about another, they at last lay violent hands upon themselves, and assume no small credit for the sang froid with which they meet death. But, alas! such beings can scarcely be said to die, for they have never truly lived.
The good opinion of our fellow men is the strongest, though not the purest motive to virtue.
If a cause be good, the most violent attack of its enemies will not injure it so much as an injudicious defence of it by its friends.
Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.
Taking things not as they ought to be, but as they are, I fear it must be allowed that Macchiavelli will always have more disciples than Jesus.
To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it: the pains of power are real, its pleasures imaginary.
A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation.
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.
Human foresight often leaves its proudest possessor only a choice of evils.
Make no enemies; he is insignificant indeed that can do thee no harm.
Pleasure is to women what the sun is to the flower; if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, deteriorates and destroys.
He that studies only men will get the body of knowledge without the soul; and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.
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