“God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech.”

In a crowd, on a journey, at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.

It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.

Nothing is more dangerous to men than a sudden change of fortune.

Study depends on the goodwill of the student, a quality that cannot be secured by compulsion.

Virtue, though she gets her beginning from nature, yet receives her finishing touches from learning.

Let us never adopt the maxim, Rather lose our friend than our jest.

Though ambition in itself is a vice, yet it is often the parent of virtues.

We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.

While we are examining into everything we sometimes find truth where we least expected it.

It seldom happens that a premature shoot of genius ever arrives at maturity.

Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.

Forbidden pleasures alone are loved immoderately; when lawful, they do not excite desire.

Everything that has a beginning comes to an end.

He who speaks evil only differs from his who does evil in that he lacks opportunity.

Fear of the future is worse than one’s present fortune.

The obscurity of a writer is generally in proportion to his incapacity.

As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.

The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

In exalting the faculties of the soul, we annihilate, in a great degree, the delusion of the senses.

I would never accept the recommendation of the theological faculty.

The true scientist never loses the faculty of amazement.

Some of our philosophizing divines have too much exalted the faculties of our souls, when they have maintained that by their force mankind has been able to find out God.

Realisation is not acquisition of anything new nor is it a new faculty. It is only removal of all camouflage.