“That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.”
“Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.”
“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”
“Labor, if it were not necessary for existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man.”
“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.”
“Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience. You will find it a calamity.”
“He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.”
“The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.”
“The wise man applauds he who he thinks most virtuous; the rest of the world applauds the wealthy.”
“The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a years.”
“It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.”
“No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.”
“When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped.”
“If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.”
“He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.”
“No two men can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.”
“Ah! Sir, a boy's being flogged is not so severe as a man's having the hiss of the world against him.”
“I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.”
“His scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises.”
“Their learning is like bread in a besieged town: every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.”
“Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.”
“Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”
“The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.”
“Knowledge is of two kinds: We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information about it.”
“We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.”
“A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”
“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”
“The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.”
“Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray one.”
“Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”