Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.

Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.

We are all of us, more or less, the slaves of opinion.

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.

If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them; if we are constantly with them, we despise them.

I maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding between people of education and without it - between those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.