There is no easy path leading out of life, and few are the easy ones that lie within it.
We cannot conquer fate and necessity, yet we can yield to them in such a manner as to be greater than if we could.
What is reading but silent conversation?
Men, like snails, lose their usefulness when they lose direction and begin to bend.
We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.
Friendship may sometimes step a few paces in advance of truth.
As there are some flowers which you should smell but slightly to extract all that is pleasant in them ... so there are some men with whom a slight acquaintance is quite sufficient to draw out all that is agreeable; a more intimate one would be unsafe and unsatisfactory.
Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose direction and begin to bend.
Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
We talk on principle, but we act on interest.
No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken, Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.
Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art: I warm'd both hands before the fire of life; It sinks; and I am ready to depart.
What is reading but silent conversation.
Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked.
Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.
Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.
An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.
Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in excess.
The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour.
Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who think differently from him.
