Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.

The English, of all ranks and classes, are at bottom, in all their feelings, aristocrats. They have some concept of liberty, and set some value on it, but the very idea of equality is strange and offensive to them. They do not dislike to have many people above them as long as they have some below them.

It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.

That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development, and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the varieties of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate.

So true is that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural.