A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.

A nickname is the heaviest stone that the Devil can throw at a man.

You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.

If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.

Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.

We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.

The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.

Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.

The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.

Man is a make-believe animal - he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.