Artificial manners vanish the moment the natural passions are touched.

when driven to the necessity of explaining, I found that I did not myself understand what I meant.

why will friends publish all the trash they can scrape together of celebrated people?

Fortune's wheel never stands still the highest point is therefore the most perilous.

When the mind is full of any one subject, that subject seems to recur with extraordinary frequency - it appears to pursue or to meet us at every turn: in every conversation that we hear in every book we open, in every newspaper we take up, the reigning idea recurs; and then we are surprised, and exclaim at these wonderful coincidences.

Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember, than to forgive and forget.

The labor of thinking was so great to me, that having once come to a conclusion upon any subject, I would rather persist in it, right or wrong, than be at the trouble of going over the process again to revise and rectify my judgment.