If a book really wants the patronage of a great name, it is a bad book; and if it be a good book, it wants it not.

When millions applaud you seriously ask yourself what harm you have done; and when they disapprove you, what good.

Insults are engendered from vulgar minds, like toadstools from a dunghill.

Life often presents us with a choice of evils, rather than of goods.

Evils in the journey of life are like the hills which alarm travelers upon their road; they both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we find that they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived.

Falsehood is never so successful as when she baits her hook with truth, and no opinions so fatally mislead us as those that are not wholly wrong, as no watches so effectively deceive the wearer as those that are sometimes right.

There is this difference between happiness and wisdom; he that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool.