By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to despise ourselves.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.

Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.

Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it

I have known persons without a friend--never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to make the whole world their enemies.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.