Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Harshness and unkindness are relative. The appearance of them may be the fruits of the greatest kindness.
In cases where every thing is understood, and measured, and reduced to rule, love is out of the question.
Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.
I never did, and I never will, thank any man for altering any one word of my compositions without my privity.
If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.
Our judgment will always suspect those weapons that can be used with equal prospect of success on both sides.
To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation is the sentiment of a barbarian.
But the watchful care of the parent is endless. The youth is never free from the danger of grating interference.
Love conquers all difficulties, surmounts all obstacles, and effects what to any other power would be impossible.
Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.
Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.
In infamy, it is wisely provided that he who stands highest in the ranks of society has the heaviest load to sustain.
The great model of the affection of love in human beings is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children.
The man who plays his part upon the theatre of life almost always maintains what may be called an artificial character.
Everything in the world is conducted by gradual process. This seems to be the great principle of harmony in the universe.
Self-respect to be nourished in the mind of the pupil, is one of the most valuable results of a well conducted education.
A world of derived beings, an immense, wide creation, requires an extended scale with various ranks and orders of existence.
Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.
We are so curiously made that one atom put in the wrong place in our original structure will often make us unhappy for life.
To diminish the cases in which the assistance of others is felt absolutely necessary is the only genuine road to independence.
Government, as it was forced upon mankind by their vices, so has it commonly been the creature of their ignorance and mistake.
Duty is that mode of action which constitutes the best application of the capacity of the individual to the general advantage.
There is nothing that human imagination can figure brilliant and enviable that human genius and skill do not aspire to realize.
The subtleties of mathematics defecate the grossness of our apprehension, and supply the elements of a sounder and severer logic.
I was brought up in great tenderness, and though my mind was proud to independence, I was never led to much independence of feeling.
Tenderness is the name for a lover's most exquisite sensation; protection is implied in his most generous and heart-thrilling impulse.
Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind.
The most desirable state of mankind is that which maintains general security with the smallest encroachment upon individual independence.
Above all we should not forget, that government is an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind.
Whenever truth stands in the mind unaccompanied by the evidence upon which it depends, it cannot properly be said to be apprehended at all.
My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.
Duty is that mode of action on the part of the individual which constitutes the best possible application of his capacity to the general benefit.
There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.
Extraordinary circumstances often bring along with them extraordinary strength. No man knows, till the experiment, what he is capable of effecting.
It is one of the oldest maxims of moral prudence: Do not, by aspiring to what is impracticable, lose the opportunity of doing the good you can effect!
What is high birth to him to whom high birth has never been the theme of his contemplation? What is a throne to him who has never dreamed of a throne?
The world is all alike. Those that seem better than their neighbours are only more artful. They mean the same thing, though they take a different road.
I am an enemy to revolutions. I abhor, both from temper and from the clearest judgment I am able to form, all violent convulsions in the affairs of men.
We have, all of us, our duties. Every action of our lives, and every word that we utter, will either conduce to or detract from the discharge of our duty.
Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.
Man is a being of a mixed nature; and, as there is no integrity without its flaws, so is there no man so knavish but that in some things he may be trusted.
One of the prerogatives by which man is eminently distinguished from all other living beings inhabiting this globe of earth, consists in the gift of reason.
Was ever a great discovery prosecuted or an important benefit conferred upon the human race by him who was incapable of standing and thinking and feeling alone?
Soundness of understanding is connected with freedom of enquiry; consequently, opinion should, as far as public security will admit, be exempted from restraint.
The four principal oral instructors to whom I feel my mind indebted for improvement were Joseph Fawcet, Thomas Holcroft, George Dyson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The first duty of man is to take none of the principles of conduct upon trust; to do nothing without a clear and individual conviction that it is right to be done.
Every man has a certain sphere of discretion which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbours. This right flows from the very nature of man.
Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.
It is indeed specially characteristic of the passion of love that it has the faculty of giving a perpetual flow to the interchange of sentiments and reflections in conversation.
If admiration were not generally deemed the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lackey of poverty, the love of gain would cease to be an universal problem.