“Constant success shows us but one side of the world. For as it surrounds us with friends who will tell us only our merits, so it silences those enemies from whom alone we can learn our defects.”

It is astonishing how much more people are interested in lengthening life than improving it.

Most females will forgive a liberty rather than a slight.

Those that are the loudest in their threats are the weakest in their actions.

The avarice of the miser may be termed the grand sepulchral of all his other passions, as they successively decay.

I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities, improve their talents but impair their virtues; and strengthen their minds but weaken their morals.

Human foresight often leaves its proudest possessor only a choice of evils.

Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.

The true measure of your character is what you do when nobody’s watching.

To cure us of our immoderate love of gain, we should seriously consider how many goods there are that money will not purchase, and these the best; and how many evils there are that money will not remedy, and these the worst.

It is not so difficult a task to plant new truths, as to root out old errors; for there is this paradox in men, they run after that which is new, but are prejudiced in favor of that which is old.

Hope is a prodigal young heir, and experience is his banker.

A fool is often as dangerous to deal with as a knave, and always more incorrigible.

He that studies books alone, will know how things ought to be; and he that studies men, will know how things are.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

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.

Doubt is the vestibule of faith.

We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.

William Gladstone has not a single redeeming defect.

Some people displease with merit, and others’ very faults and defects are pleasing.

The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age.

The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind, and they are in continual danger of breaking the skin and bursting out again.

Weakness of character is the only defect which cannot be amended.

All authors to their own defects are blind.