One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself |
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone. |
One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect. |
One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world. |
One would imagine that books were, like women, the worse for being old : that they open their leaves more cordially; that the spirit of enjoyment wears out with the spirit of novelty; and that after a certain age, it is high time to put them on the s |
Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. |
Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter, we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them. |
Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do. |
Our notions with respect to the importance of life, and our attachment to it, depend on a principle which has very little to do with its happiness or its misery. . . . The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions. |
Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain |
People are not soured by misfortune, but by the reception they meet with in it. |
People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking |
Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern - why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? To die is only to be as we were before we were born. |
Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men. |
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. |