The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance. They treat everything with contempt which they do not understand.

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.

The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: the one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.

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.

We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.

That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.