We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.

A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.

The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.