Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labor equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal super-abundance.

The sense of danger is never, perhaps, so fully apprehended as when the danger has been overcome.

It is better in some respects to be admired by those with whom you live than to be loved by them; and this not on account of any gratification of vanity, but because admiration is so much more tolerant than love.

The apparent foolishness of others is but too frequently our own ignorance.

There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.

Those who never philosophized until they met with disappointments, have mostly become disappointed philosophers

There is one statesman of the present day, of whom I always say that he would have escaped making the blunders that he has made if he had only ridden more in buses.