Quote collection
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"There is little peace or comfort in life if we are always anxious as to future events. He that worries himself with the dread of possible contingencies will never be at rest."
"An age that melts in unperceiv'd decay, And glides in modest innocence away."
"When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining; but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away."
"Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language."
"It is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon the chastity of a wife."
"Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled."
"Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree. We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us."
"No man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation."
"Is not a patron one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?"
"An exotic and irrational entertainment."
"To see helpless infancy stretching out her hands, and pouring out her cries in testimony of dependence, without any powers to alarm jealousy, or any guilt to alienate affection, must surely awaken tenderness in every human mind; and tenderness once excited will be hourly increased by the natural contagion of felicity, by the repercussion of communicated pleasure, by the consciousness of dignity of benefaction."
"Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility."
"All envy is proportionate to desire."
"When desperate ills demand a speedy cure, Distrust is cowardice, and prudence folly."
"Credulity is the common failing of inexperienced virtue; and he who is spontaneously suspicious may justly be charged with radical corruption."
"Everybody knows worse of himself than he knows of other men."
"To be of no Church is dangerous."
"It is not difficult to conceive, however, that for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives. For without entering into refined speculations, it may be shown much easier to design than to perform. A man proposes his schemes of life in a state of abstraction and disengagement, exempt from the enticements of hope, the solicitations of affection, the importunities of appetite, or the depressions of fear."
"Sir, when you have seen one green field, you have seen all green fields. Let us walk down Cheapside."
"The whole power of cunning is privative; to say nothing, and to do nothing , is the utmost of its reach. Yet men, thus narrow by nature and mean by art, are sometimes able to rise by the miscarriages of bravery and the openness of integrity, and, watching failures and snatching opportunities, obtain advantages which belong to higher characters."