Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am very fond of the company of ladies. I like their beauty, I like their delicacy, I like their vivacity, and I like their silence.
Friendship, peculiar boon of Heaven, The noble mind's delight and pride, To men and angels only given, To all the lower world denied.
Life, to be worthy of a rational being, must be always in progression; we must always purpose to do more or better than in time past.
A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.
Good-humor is a state between gayety and unconcern,--the act or emanation of a mind at leisure to regard the gratification of another.
There must always be some advantage on one side or the other, and it is better that advantage should be had by talents than by chance.
He that accepts protection, stipulates obedience. We have always protected the Americans; we may therefore subject them to government.
There is not, perhaps, to a mind well instructed, a more painful occurrence, than the death of one we have injured without reparation.
Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.
We owe to memory not only the increase of our knowledge, and our progress in rational inquiries, but many other intellectual pleasures
The eye of the mind, like that of the body, can only extend its view to new objects, by losing sight of those which are now before it.
[C]ourage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.
It is unpleasing to represent our affairs to our own disadvantage; yet it is necessary to shew the evils which we desire to be removed.
It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.
To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.
A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died; it was the triumph of hope over experience.
Differences, we know, are never so effectually laid asleep as by some common calamity; an enemy unites all to whom he threatens danger.
Then with no throbs of fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And freed his soul the nearest way.
Whoever shall review his life, will find that the whole tenor of his conduct has been determined by some accident of no apparent moment.
A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.
It is however, reasonable, to have perfection in our eye; that we may always advance towards it, though we know it never can be reached.
I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.
In misery's darkest cavern known, His useful care was ever nigh Where hopeless anguish pour'd his groan, And lonely want retir'd to die.
Nothing has tended more to retard the advancement of science than the disposition in vulgar minds to vilify what they cannot comprehend.
When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.
We often look with indifference on the successive parts of something that, if the whole were seen together, would shake us with emotion.
Exert your talents, and distinguish yourself, and don't think of retiring from the world, until the world will be sorry that you retire.
We suffer equal pain from the pertinacious adhesion of unwelcome images, as from the evanescence of those which are pleasing and useful.
No man can have much kindness for him by whom he does not believe himself esteemed, and nothing so evidently proves esteem as imitation.
Let him go abroad to a distant country; let him go to some place where he is not known. Don't let him go to the devil, where he is known.
Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.
Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.
The violence of war admits no distinction; the lance, that is lifted at guilt and power, will sometimes fall on innocence and gentleness.
It is easy for a man who sits idle at home, and has nobody to please but himself, to ridicule or censure the common practices of mankind.
The hapless wit has his labors always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another.
We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.
I also admit, that there are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits which are not good till they are rotten.
If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.
I believe it will be found that those who marry late are best pleased with their children; and those who marry early, with their partners.
I have no more pleasure in hearing a man attempting wit and failing, than in seeing a man trying to leap over a ditch and tumbling into it
Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves.
The love of fame is a passion natural and universal, which no man, however high or mean, however wise or ignorant, was yet able to despise.
Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent.
Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals, or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other.
Pointed axioms and acute replies fly loose about the world, and are assigned successively to those whom it may be the fashion to celebrate.
There are few so free from vanity as not to dictate to those who will hear their instructions with a visible sense of their own beneficence.
The stream of Time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.
Present opportunities are neglected, and attainable good is slighted, by minds busied in extensive ranges and intent upon future advantages.