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Unlimited power is helpless, as arbitrary power is capricious. Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We can attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter; we can persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them. - [Power] Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere. - [Vice] Virtue may be said to steal, like a guilty thing, into the secret haunts of vice and infamy; it clings to their devoted victim, and will not be driven quite away. Nothing can destroy the human heart. - [Virtue] Walk groundly, talk profoundly, drink roundly, sleep soundly. - [Sleep] Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap. - [Power] 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. - [Disguise] We are governed by sympathy; and the extent of our sympathy is determined by that of our sensibility. - [Sympathy] We are more jealous of frivolous accomplishments with brilliant success, than of the most estimable qualities without. Dr. Johnson envied Garrick, whom he despised, and ridiculed Goldsmith, whom he loved. - [Jealousy] We are not hypocrites in our sleep. - [Dreams] We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received. - [Good Will] We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed or damps our efforts. - [Appreciation] We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit. - [Self-conceit] We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear; we are torn from ourselves while living, year after year sees us no longer the same, and death only consigns the last fragment of what we were to the grave. - [Death] We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults reconcile us to their virtues. - [Censure] We go on a journey to be free of all impediments; to leave ourselves behind much more than to get rid of others. - [Traveling] We grow tired of ourselves, much more of other people. - [Satiety] We had rather do anything than acknowledge the merit of another if we can help it. We cannot bear a superior or an equal. Hence ridicule is sure to prevail over truth, for the malice of mankind, thrown into the scale, gives the casting weight. - [Envy] We judge of others for the most part by their good opinion of themselves; yet nothing gives such offense or creates so many enemies, as that extreme self-complacency or superciliousness of manner, which appears to set the opinion of every one else at defiance. - [Conceit] We may give more offense by our silence than even by impertinence. - [Silence] We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it. - [Wit] We talk little if we do not talk about ourselves. - [Talking] We would willingly, and without remorse, sacrifice not only the present moment, but all the interval (no matter how long) that separates us from any favorite object. - [Impatience] Weakness has its hidden resources, as well as strength. There is a degree of folly and meanness which we cannot calculate upon, and by which we are as much liable to be foiled as by the greatest ability or courage. - [Weakness] What passes in the world for talent or dexterity or enterprise is often only a want of moral principle. We may succeed where others fail, not from a greater share of invention, but from not being nice in the choice of expedients. - [Enterprise] Whatever excites the spirit of contradiction is capable of producing the last effects of heroism; which is only the highest pitch of obstinacy, in a good or bad cause, in wisdom or folly. - [Obstinacy] Displaying page 9 of 11 for this author: << Prev Next >> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 [9] 10 11
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