If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.

Starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags , we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.

There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.

Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to dip on.