There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by them.

If you cannot avoid a quarrel with a blackguard, let your lawyer manage it, rather than yourself. No man sweeps his own chimney, but employs a chimney-sweeper, who has no objection to dirty work, because it is his trade.

It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and not a very arduous task to astonish them; but essentially to benefit and to improve them is a work fraught with difficulty, and teeming with danger.

Theory is worth but little, unless it can explain its own phenomena, and it must effect this without contradicting itself; therefore, the facts are sometimes assimilated to the theory, rather than the theory to the facts.

Those who have finished by making all others think with them, have usually been those who began by daring to think with themselves.

Philosophy is a goddess, whose head indeed is in heaven, but whose feet are upon earth; she attempts more than she accomplishes, and promises more than she performs.

The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number.