The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.

To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.

Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith's bellows: they take breath but are not alive.

There is no flattery so adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent.

There is something captivating in spirit and intrepidity, to which, we often yield as to a resistless power; nor can he reasonably expect, the confidence of others who too apparently distrusts himself.

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.

Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.