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

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

In each of us there is a little of all of us.

To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.