Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.

Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.

Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.

A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.

[Science is] the desire to know causes.

One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it.

It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices. The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by former theories, though strengthened by exercise and information.