Many books owe their success to the good memories of their authors and the bad memories of their readers.

Men are more readily contented with no intellectual light than with a little; and wherever they have been taught to acquire some knowledge in order to please others, they have most generally gone on to acquire more, to please themselves.

Very great personages are not likely to form very just estimates either of others or of themselves; their knowledge of themselves is obscured by the flattery of others; their knowledge of others is equally clouded by circumstances peculiar to themselves. For in the presence of the great, the modest are sure to suffer from too much diffidence, and the confident from too much display.

Any one can give advice, such as it is, but only a wise man knows how to profit by it.

A youth without fire is followed by an old age without experience.

The enthusiast has been compared to a man walking in a fog; everything immediately around him, or in contact with him, appears sufficiently clear and luminous; but beyond the little circle of which he himself is the centre, all is mist and error and confusion.

He that dies a martyr proves that he was not a knave, but by no means that he was not a fool.