“The head of dullness, unlike the tail of the torpedo, loses nothing of the benumbing and lethargizing influence by reiterated discharges.”

No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful.

It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.

Men’s arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.

Wit may do very well for a mistress, but I should prefer reason for a wife.

Women that are the least bashful are often the most modest.

Self-denial is often the sacrifice of one sort of self-love for another.

The worst thing that can be said of the most powerful is that they can take your life; but the same can be said of the most weak.

A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation.

We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.

To admit that there is any such thing as chance, in the common acceptation of the term, would be to attempt to establish a power independent of God.

A house may draw visitors, but it is the possessor alone that can detain them.

We are more inclined to hate one another for points on which we differ, than to love one another for points on which we agree.

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.

Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret.

Immitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Diffidence is the better part of knowledge.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

Fortunately, the courts discharged me every time after they understood what I had done.