The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.

The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.

From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.