Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.

When one can do better than everyone else in the same walk, one does not make any very painful exertions to outdo oneself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends.

Time,--the most independent of all things.

The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.

Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.

Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.

To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.