Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.
True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves - neither more nor less.
No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.
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.
One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.
Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night.
To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.
Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.
The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance. They treat everything with contempt which they do not understand.
The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.
I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.
Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings; and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.
Those only deserve a monument who do not need one; that is, who have raised themselves a monument in the minds and memories of men.
Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else.
Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.
There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.
There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.
Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.
As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.
One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.
Genius is native to the soil where it grows — is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun — and is not a hot - house plant or an exotic.
It might be argued, that to be a knave is the gift of fortune, but to play the fool to advantage it is necessary to be a learned man.
We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.
We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.
We often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again.
Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.
The truly proud man knows neither superiors or inferiors. The first he does not admit of - the last he does not concern himself about.
It is well there is no one without fault; for he would not have a friend in the world. He would seem to belong to s different species.
There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.
In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs.
Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.
Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded.
To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.
The fear of approaching death, which in youth we imagine must cause inquietude to the aged, is very seldom the source of much uneasiness.
The number of objects we see from living in a large city amuses the mind like a perpetual raree-show, without supplying it with any ideas.
The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously, and those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.
Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.
The wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearning after happiness; and to desire is in some sense to enjoy.
A person who talks with equal vivacity on every subject, excites no interest in any. Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.
Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.
It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.
To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.
Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.
Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith's bellows: they take breath but are not alive.
There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.
Painters... are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds.