Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.
Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.
The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.
The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience. You will find it a calamity.
The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.
Friendship, ‘the wine of life,’ said Boswell, should, like a well-stocked cellar, be thus continually renewed. And Dr. Johnson added to this A man, Sir, should keep his friendships in constant repair.
He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.
The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.
Those who attain to any excellence commonly spend life in some single pursuit, for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.
Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.
No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.
Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.
When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.
It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.
A vow is a snare for sin.
If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.
He who praises every body, praises nobody.
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