To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.

The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.

Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.

In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.

We prefer ourselves to others, only because we a have more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person's.

Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.

He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery.