Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.

Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

Instead of making Christianity a vehicle of truth, you make truth only a horse for Christianity.

It is not the irregular hours or irregular diet that makes the romantic life.

The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to hermother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.