I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.

There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable.

An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.

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

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.

He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.

...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.