Some women destroy all your sensibility towards them by their coldness, others by their heat.

It would be doing cunning too much honor to call it an inferior species of true discernment.

Two men are equally free from the rage of ambition; are they therefore equal in merit? Perhaps not; one may be above ambition, the other below it.

If the human mind naturally produces noisome weeds, it also produces flowers and fruit; and ... the best method to mend the soil in general, is for each of us to cultivate his own particular spot.

We are not slow at discovering the selfishness of others; for this plain reason--because it clashes with our own.

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.

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.