It is easier to pretend to be what you are not than to hide what you really are; but he that can accomplish both has little to learn in hypocrisy.

With the offspring of genius, the law of parturition is reversed; the throes are in the conception, the pleasure in the birth.

Subtlety will sometimes give safety, no less than strength; and minuteness has sometimes escaped, where magnitude would have been crushed. The little animal that kills the boa is formidable chiefly from its insignificance, which is incompressible by the folds of its antagonist.

The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later.

In answering an opponent, arrange your ideas, but not your words.

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

In all countries where nature does the most, man does the least.