No fruit has a more precise marked period of maturity, than love; if neglected to be gathered at that time, it will certainly fall to the ground and die away.

Habit is the cement of society, the comfort of life, and, alas! the root of error.

It is so much in the nature of men to overreach and deceive one another, that their very sports and plays are founded on that principle.

Let us not expect men to see truth before it is shown them; they do not see it afterwards.

There is scarce any passion so heartily decried by moralists and satirists, as AMBITION; and yet, methinks, ambition is not a vice but in a vicious mind: in a virtuous mind it is a virtue, and will be found to take its color from the character in which it is mixed. Ambition is a desire of superiority; and a man may become superior, either by making others less or himself greater.

The greatest slave in a kingdom is generally the king of it.

The mind's eye is perhaps no better fitted for the full radiance of truth, than is the body's for that of the sun.

It by no means follows, that because two men utter the same words, they have precisely the same idea which they mean to express: language is inadequate to the variety of ideas which are conceived by different minds, and which, could they be expressed, would produce a new variety of characteristic differences between man and man.

Have you never seen a strange unconnected deformed representation of a figure, which seen in another point of view, became proportioned and agreeable? It is the picture of man.

It would be doing cunning too much honor to call it an inferior species of true discernment.

Pride ... is sometimes virtuous and sometimes vicious, according to the character in which it is found, and the object to which it is directed.

Though beauty is, with the most apt similitude, I had almost said with the most literal truth, called a flower that fades and dies almost in the very moment of its maturity; yet there is, methinks, a kind of beauty which lives even to old age; a beauty that is not in the features, but, if I may be allowed the expression, shines through them. As it is not merely corporeal it is not the object of mere sense, nor is it to be discovered but by persons of true taste and refined sentiment.

How seldom is generosity perfect and pure! How often do men give because it throws a certain inferiority on those who receive, and superiority on themselves!

Things have so many different aspects, not to mention the different dispositions of the same mind, that the most reasonable man must be liable to contradict himself.

If they who understand the utmost refinement of any art will enjoy the perfection of it in a manner superior to other men, will they not amply pay for that advantage in feeling more than other men the imperfection of it, which in the natural course of things must so much oftener fall in their way?

Wit catches of wit, as fire of fire.

Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them.

There are sometimes beauties in a character which would never have appeared but for a defect, and defects which would never have appeared but for a beauty.

It by no means follows that we acted from reason, because good reasons can be produced for what we did.

They that seldom take pleasure, seldom give pleasure.

It's a hard talk for a man to say I don't know; it hurts his pride: but should not the pretending he does, hurt it much more?

Some women destroy all your sensibility towards them by their coldness, others by their heat.

It has been said that the beauties of the mind are valuable because they are more lasting than those of the body; but I do not remember to have heard it said that the beauties of the mind are valuable because they make those of the body more lasting.

Men may be divided into two classes, according to the use they make of reason. Some men employ reason, or, as it is more commonly called, SENSE, to defend error by argument; others employ it, to discover and distinguish truth: the power, therefore, which we call SENSE, may exist without its use; and it is only valuable, in proportion as the mind is candid, dispassionate, impartial, and unprejudiced.

Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not also the only one that deserves to be laughed at?

A fish will sometimes with pleasure rise out of his element, and spring into ours: so a man will sometimes with pleasure rise from prejudice and falsehood, into the sphere of reason and truth. But the fish will most naturally and joyfully dive again into his element of water; and the man as joyfully and naturally into his element of prejudice and falsehood.

There are faults in others we are often indulgent to; I mean those which have a connection with our own.

Genius always looks forward, and not only sees what is, but what necessarily will be.

We can, in general, be much less sure of the truth of a thing, than of the falsehood; because though every part we have seen may agree, yet we cannot tell how many may be behind, and one failure of connection will be sufficient to falsify the whole.

It is in numberless instances happier to have a false opinion which we believe true, than a true one of which we doubt.

GENIUS, like a planet, takes a wide circuit through the pure expanse of nature, and visits not regions only, but whole worlds, which SENSE does not know to exist.

If the human mind naturally produces noisome weeds, it also produces flowers and fruit; and ... the best method to mend the soil in general, is for each of us to cultivate his own particular spot.

There is in some a dispassionate neutrality of mind, which, though it generally passes for good temper, can neither gratify nor warm us; it must indeed be granted that these men can only negatively offend; but then it should also be remembered that they cannot positively please.

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