All quotes

Intimate friends are not fair witnesses to character, any more than professed enemies.

This danger is greatly heightened, as it has been always observable that men are less jealous of encroachments of one department upon another than upon their own reserved rights.

was it not obvious that flocks and herds were more ready to obey their keepers than men their rulers

The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing: it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.

Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.

To not only take risks, but to be open to life. To accept new views and to be open to new opinions.

A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.

It is not down in any map; true places never are

it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric

The dullest eye in the world must surely be quickened by such trees as these.

All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry into submission.

A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite inquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour—the real labour of thinking.

Acquire a method of perceiving how all things change into one another.

But we have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more are we capable of seeing.

I was thrown out of work, and now that I had got into the habit of writing I did not know what to make of my spare time.

It is better therefore to listen patiently to a friend's rebuke, for if he should afterwards do wrong himself and so need rebuke, he has set you the example of freedom of speech.

Clumsy indeed are all words the moment the wooden stage of commonplace life is left.

What right have I to be free, that another man cannot prove himself to possess by nature?