How seldom is generosity perfect and pure! How often do men give because it throws a certain inferiority on those who receive, and superiority on themselves!

Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not also the only one that deserves to be laughed at?

The mind's eye is perhaps no better fitted for the full radiance of truth, than is the body's for that of the sun.

There are sometimes beauties in a character which would never have appeared but for a defect, and defects which would never have appeared but for a beauty.

How seldom is generosity perfect and pure! How often do men give because it throws a certain inferiority on those who receive, and superiority on themselves!

It by no means follows, that because two men utter the same words, they have precisely the same idea which they mean to express: language is inadequate to the variety of ideas which are conceived by different minds, and which, could they be expressed, would produce a new variety of characteristic differences between man and man.

How happy is it for us, that the admiration of others should depend so much more on their ignorance than our perfection!