“In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.”

Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others.

There are various sorts of curiosity; one is from interest, which makes us desire to know that which may be useful to us; and the other, from pride which comes from the wish to know what others are ignorant of.

It is not enough to have great qualities; We should also have the management of them.

A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.

If it were not for the company of fools, a witty man would often be greatly at a loss.

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?

We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them.

It is often laziness and timidity that keep us within our duty while virtue gets all the credit.

If we resist our passions, it is more due to their weakness than our strength.

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.

There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.

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

When we are in love we often doubt that which we most believe.

If we judge love by most of its effects, it resembles rather hatred than affection.

Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples.

The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.

Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,–cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.

What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife? And yet men expect that women shall put on altogether new characters when they are married, and girls think that they can do so.

A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth.

Then the small amount of forces that we would have left there might have slowed this day, but they wouldn’t have prevented it altogether.

Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care … it is another story altogether.

When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).