Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury Quotes

All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Mens Understandings.

Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance.

As accidental as my life may be, or as that random humor is, which governs it, I know nothing, after all, so real or substantial as myself

Though painting borrows help indeed from colours... it has nothing more wide of its real aim or more remote from its intention than to make a show of colours... to raise a separate and flattering pleasure to the sense.