An instinct is a blind tendency to some mode of action, independent of any consideration, on the part of the agent, of the end to which the action leads.

To know your ruling passion, examine your castles in the air.

To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without ploughing it.

When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigorous despotism.

It is not that pearls fetch a high price because men have dived for them; but on the contrary, men have dived for them because they fetch a high price.

Ethical maxims are bandied about as a sort of current coin of discourse, and, being never melted down for use, those that are of base metal are never detected.

Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry gets the best of the argument.