It is not so easy to do good as those who have never attempted it may imagine.

There are two sorts of content; one is connected with exertion, the other with habits of indolence. The first is a virtue; the other, a vice.

[On collectors of quotations:] How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets.

An orator is the worse person to tell a plain fact.

Now flattery can never do good; twice cursed in the giving and the receiving, it ought to be.

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.

If young women were not deceived into a belief that affectation pleases, they would scarcely trouble themselves to practise it so much.