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| Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly. | 1 |
| Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolonging of a real sentiment. | 2 |
| Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people’s weaknesses. | 3 |
| Death puts an end to all rivalship and competition. The dead can boast no advantage over us, nor can we triumph over them. | 4 |
| Elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman, dignity is proper to noblemen, and majesty to kings. | 5 |
| Envy is littleness of soul. | 6 |
| Envy is the deformed and distorted offspring of egotism. | 7 |
| Envy, among other ingredients, has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good fortune. | 8 |
| Faith is necessary to victory. | 9 |
| Fashion begins and ends in two things it abhors most—singularity and vulgarity. | 10 |
| Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid to be overtaken by it. It is a sign that the two things are not far asunder. | 11 |
| Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength. | 12 |
| Grace has been defined the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul. | 13 |
| Grace in women has more effect than beauty. | 14 |
| Great acts grow out of great occasions, and great occasions spring from great principles, working changes in society and tearing it up by the roots. | 15 |
| Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts. | 16 |
| Habit is necessary to give power. | 17 |
| He who comes up to his own ideal of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind. | 18 |
| He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray. | 19 |
| He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies. | 20 |
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| I am always afraid of a fool; one cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well. | 21 |
| In love we never think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love. | 22 |
| It is well that there is no one without a fault, for he would not have a friend in the world. He would seem to belong to a different species. | 23 |
| Life is the art of being well deceived. | 24 |
| Lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth. | 25 |
| Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction. | 26 |
| Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labour in it, but they labour in it because they excel. | 27 |
| Men will die for an opinion as soon as for anything else. | 28 |
| Mere sensibility is not true taste, but sensibility to real excellence is. | 29 |
| No man can thoroughly master more than one art or science. | 30 |
| No really great man ever thought himself so. | 31 |
| No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he. | 32 |
| Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after. | 33 |
| Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion. | 34 |
| Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it. | 35 |
| Our strength lies in our weakness (i.e., limitedness). | 36 |
| Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman. | 37 |
| Poetry is right royal. It puts the individual for the species, the one above the infinite many. | 38 |
| Prejudice is the child of ignorance. | 39 |
| Public opinion is the mixed result of the intellect of the community acting upon general feeling. | 40 |
| Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture. | 41 |
| The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity; of Spencer, remoteness; of Milton, elevation; of Shakespeare, everything. | 42 |
| The essence of poetry is will and passion. | 43 |
| The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the man of letters. | 44 |
| The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have. | 45 |
| The most learned are often the most narrow-minded men. | 46 |
| The public have neither shame nor gratitude. | 47 |
| The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong if we do not feel aright. | 48 |
| Those only deserve a monument who do not need one. | 49 |
| Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigour, and not by patient, wary steps. | 50 |
| To be young is to be as one of the immortals. | 51 |
| To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did, you would find fault with him as a pedant. | 52 |
| Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere. | 53 |
| We are sure to judge wrong if we do not feel aright. | 54 |
| We do not die wholly at our deaths; we have mouldered away gradually long before. | 55 |
| We may give more offence by our silence than even by impertinence. | 56 |
| We talk little if we do not talk about ourselves. | 57 |
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