There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.

Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.

The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.

We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.

To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.

Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.

There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary.