When millions applaud you seriously ask yourself what harm you have done; and when they disapprove you, what good.
— Charles Caleb Colton
Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us - never cease to instruct - never cloy.
Physical courage, which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another.
Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.
There is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence.
Knowledge is two-fold, and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of that which is false.
Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.
Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.
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.
Many speak the truth when they say that they despise riches, but they mean the riches possessed by others.
I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.
Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.
We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.
To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.
Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable.
Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.
Those that are the loudest in their threats are the weakest in their actions.
There are three modes of bearing the ills of life, by indifference, by philosophy, and by religion.
Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.
Nothing so completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straightforward and simple integrity in another.
He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be, and he who studies men will know how they are.
We ask advice, but we mean approbation.
None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them.
The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.
When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.
To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.
Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride.
Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.
The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later.
It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck.
Constant success shows us but one side of the world; adversity brings out the reverse of the picture.
There is this difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool.
He that knows himself, knows others; and he that is ignorant of himself, could not write a very profound lecture on other men's heads.
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.
Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
Friendship, of itself a holy tie, is made more sacred by adversity.
If a horse has four legs, and I'm riding it, I think I can win.
True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.
He that has energy enough to root out a vice should go further, and try to plant a virtue in its place.
True contentment depends not upon what we have; a tub was large enough for Diogenes, but a world was too little for Alexander.
The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.
