Action requires co-operation, but in general if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them which they do not like.

All people are passionate in what concerns themselves, or in what they take an interest in. The range of this last is different in different persons; but the want of passion is but another name for the want of sympathy and imagination.

Comparisons are odious, because they are impertinent making one thing the standard of another which has no relation to it.

Envy, among other ingredients, has a mixture of love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good fortune.

For not only a man's actions are effaced and vanish with him; his virtues and generous qualities die with him also: his intellect only is immortal and bequeathed unimpaired to posterity. Words are the only things that last for ever.

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

It is essential for the triumph of reform that it shall never succeed.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they might have been.

One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was time when we were not; this gives us no concern -- why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.

The best way to procure insults is to submit to them.

The more we do, the more we can do.

The most sensible people to be met within 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.

The only impeccable writers are those that never wrote.

There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.

The truly proud man knows neither superiors or inferiors. The first he does not admit of; the last he does not concern himself about.

Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.

Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.

To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.

Walk groundly, talk profoundly, drink roundly, sleep soundly.

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