All quotes

I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.

Responsibility is null when nobody knows who is responsible; nor, even when real, can it be divided without being weakened.

There is no act which more imperatively requires to be performed under a strong sense of individual responsibility than the nomination to employments.

A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it.

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.

At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did not.

At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.

But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream.

The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means?

Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end.

A good despotism is an altogether false ideal, which practically (except as a means to some temporary purpose) becomes the most senseless and dangerous of chimeras.

Between subjection to the will of others and the virtues of self-help and self-government there is a natural incompatibility.

One of the benefits of freedom is that under it the ruler can not pass by the people's minds, and amend their affairs for them without amending them.

One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.

Only an unmitigated despotism demands that the individual citizen shall obey unconditionally every mandate of persons in authority.

The interest of the people is that there should be full liberty of censure on every public officer, and on every public act or measure.

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that

The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way

To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.

A Sultan's favourite slave has slaves under her, over whom she tyrannizes; but the desirable thing would be that she should neither have slaves nor be a slave.

Even the commonest men reserve the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish side of their character for those who have no power to withstand it.

The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural.

All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.