Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.
If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.
Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.
One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.
Courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace.
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.
Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.
The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.
In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.
He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.
To be innocent is to be not guilty; but to be virtuous is to overcome our evil inclinations.
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he does not.
Their learning is like bread in a besieged town: every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.
Music causes us to think eloquently.
As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
To be good is noble, but to teach others how to be good is nobler and less trouble.
Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.
Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.
All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.
Pity the man who has a character to support – it is worse than a large family – he is silent poor indeed.
