Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretences to both.

We as often repent the good we have done as the ill.

Those who are fond of setting things to rights, have no great objection to seeing them wrong.

Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements.

What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.

An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does, he gets beyond his hearers.

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.

A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the two great springs of life, Hope and Fear.

General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.

The truly proud man knows neither superiors nor inferiors. The first he does not admit of—the last he does not concern himself about.