Quote collection
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"It is generally allowed, that no man ever found the happiness of possession proportionate to that expectation which incited his desire, and invigorated his pursuit; nor has any man found the evils of life so formidable in reality, as they were described to him by his own imagination; every species of distress brings with it some peculiar supports, some unforeseen means of resisting, or powers of enduring."
"Discord generally operates in little things; it is inflamed ... by contrariety of taste oftener than principles."
"Disease generally begins that equality which death completes; the distinctions which set one man so much above another are very little perceived in the gloom of a sick chamber, where it will be vain to expect entertainment from the gay, or instruction from the wise; where all human glory is obliterated, the wit is clouded, the reasoner perplexed, and the hero subdued; where the highest and brightest of mortal beings finds nothing left him but the consciousness of innocence."
"No man hates him at whom he can laugh."
"Gratitude is a species of justice."
"In the motive lies the good or ill."
"Wealth is nothing in itself; it is not useful but when it departs from us."
"A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own lustre."
"Unconstraint is the grace of conversation."
"History can be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost forever."
"People may be taken in once, who imagine that an author is greater in private life than other men."
"A man finds in the productions of nature an inexhaustible stock of material on which he can employ himself, without any temptations to envy or malevolence, and has always a certain prospect of discovering new reasons for adoring the sovereign author of the universe."
"The worst evils are those that never arrive."
"It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present."
"That distrust which intrudes so often on your mind is a mode of melancholy, which, if it be the business of a wise man to be happy, it is foolish to indulge; and if it be a duty to preserve our faculties entire for their proper use, it is criminal. Suspicion is very often an useless pain."
"He to whom many objects of pursuit arise at the same time, will frequently hesitate between different desires till a rival has precluded him, or change his course as new attractions prevail, and harass himself without advancing."
"Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle."
"That we must all die, we always knew, I wish I had sooner remembred it."
"So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something."
"Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again."