What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.

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.

There is a quiet repose and steadiness about the happiness of age, if the life has been well spent. Its feebleness is not painful. The nervous system has lost its acuteness. But, in mature years we feel that a burn, a scald, a cut, is more tolerable than it was in the sensitive period of youth.

We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.

The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.

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

There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.