 Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride. |
| Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed. |
| Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds. |
| To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread. |
| The consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. Thus the American Revolution, from which little was expected, produced much; but the French Revolution, from which much was expected, produced little. |
| Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish. |
| We often pretend to fear what we really despise, and more often despise what we really fear. |
| Those that are the loudest in their threats are the weakest in their actions. |
| Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes. |
| If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition. |
| We own almost all our knowledge not to those who have agreed but to those who have differed. |
| Patience is the support of weakness; impatience the ruin of strength. |
| Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable. |
| Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost. |
| Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. |
| To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author. |
| True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost. Topics: Friendship |
| There are two way of establishing a reputation, one to be praised by honest people and the other to be accused by rogues. It is best, however, to secure the first one, because it will always be accompanied by the latter. |
| Knowledge is two-fold, and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of that which is false. |
| We ask advice, but we mean approbation. |
