More sinners are cursed at not because we despise their sins but because we envy their success at sinning.

He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.

Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.

The perfect disinterestedness and self-devotion of which men seem incapable, but which is sometimes found in women.

The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

The study of the properties of numbers, Plato tells us, habituates the mind to the contemplation of pure truth, and raises us above the material universe. He would have his disciples apply themselves to this study, not that they may be able to buy or sell, not that they may qualify themselves to be shopkeepers or travelling merchants, but that they may learn to withdraw their minds from the ever-shifting spectacle of this visible and tangible world, and to fix them on the immutable essences of things.