One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it.
Experience makes us wise.
The love of fame is too high and delicate a feeling in the mind to be mixed up with realities, it is a solitary abstraction. * * * A name "fast anchored in the deep abyss of time" is like a star twinkling in the firmament, cold, silent, distant, but eternal and sublime; and our transmitting one to posterity is as if we should contemplate our translation to the skies.
No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.
Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.
...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages.
A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.
The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
The incentive to ambition is the love of power.
Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite
Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.
We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.
Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them.
Those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.
We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.
Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
Natural affection is a prejudice; for though we have cause to love our nearest connections better than others, we have no reason to think them better than others.
Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.
When you find out a man's ruling passion, beware of crossing him in it.
The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.
Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement; it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.
Some one is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke.
Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men.
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