Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.

From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.

To create an unfavourable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said.

The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously; and those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.

Genius is a native to the soil where it grows—is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun; and is not a hothouse plant or an exotic.

Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.

We often choose a friend as we do a mistress— for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.