All quotes

Nothing is more hidden from us than the illusion which lives with us day by day, and our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.

Having treated my friend ill, I wished to apologize; but, not meeting him, I made an apology to myself.

If he is perplexed, unhappy, restless, or wretched, let him look to himself, for there and nowhere else is the source of all his trouble.

Nothing comes unbidden; where the shadow is, there also is the substance.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously.

angry people are not always wise

Every artist does something more than copy Nature; more comes out in his account than goes into the original experience.

There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life-experience.

For he that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read but the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced of the contrary.

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

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.

The concepts of "majority" and "minority" necessarily reflect temporary arrangements and political judgments.

It’s just as important where we are not as it is where we are.

They may be truths to me, but don’t think that that makes them mine… because you can’t own a truth.

In our ordinary actions there is not one of a thousand that concerns ourselves.

Retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare yourself there to receive yourself: it were a folly to trust yourself in your own hands, if you cannot govern yourself.

Wherefore the nature of a multitude is no more to be blamed than the nature of princes, since both equally err when they can do so without regard to consequences.

Nevertheless, he who has relied least on fortune is established the strongest.

princes ought to leave affairs of reproach to the management of others, and keep those of grace in their own hands

the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market

Numa's virtue made him so celebrated that he was judged worthy to be king, Lykurgus' made him so great that he did not care to be king.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist

Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.

While the Constitution diffuses power the better to secure liberty, it also contemplates that practice will integrate the dispersed powers into a workable government.