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

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

... an inaccurate use of words produces such a strange confusion in all reasoning, that in the heat of debate, the combatants, unable to distinguish their friends from their foes, fall promiscuously on both.

Remember, we can judge better by the conduct of people towards others than by their manner towards ourselves.

how impossible it is not to laugh in some company, or to laugh in others.

sometimes the very faults of parents produce a tendency to opposite virtues in their children.

Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as I ever had in my life.