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If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial. Such joys are reserved for conscious merit.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing! Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts- not to hurt others.

It had been her nature when a child never to quarrel with anyone- only to observe with wonder that they quarreled with her, and looked like turkey-cocks; whereupon she was ready to play cat's cradle with them whenever they recovered themselves.

Who am I? The unhoused, the fugitive,
The aimless, restless reprobate,
Plunging like some wild waterfall from cliff to cliff
Down to the abyss, in greedy furious spate!

Fate has endowed him with the blind
Impatience of an ever-striving mind;
In headlong haste it drives him on,
He skips the earth and leaves its joys behind.

(Translator note): Translation is the art of the least insufferable sacrifice, of the instinctive choice between competing imperfections; it constantly exercises a kind of informed judgment which it is almost impossible to rationalize or to discuss with anyone else. Pg. lii.

At first his heart contracted with an aching sadness, but soon this gave way to sweet disquiet, a Gypsy's wandering unrest.

To hang the laws at such a height that no citizen could read them, as Dionysius the Tyrant did, is an injustice of exactly the same kind as to bury them in extensive in an extensive apparatus of learned books and collections of verdicts based on divergent judgements, opinions, practices, etc...

"He is clever," thought Ivan. "One must admit that even among intellectuals there are sometimes highly intelligent men"

...Pascal also quotes Christ's intercession on the Cross for his enemies: "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do"- a superfluous request if the fact that they did not know what they were doing removed the quality of evil from their action so that it did not require forgiveness.

Conscience, as formal subjectivity, consists simply in the possibility of turning at any moment to evil; for both morality and evil have their common root in that self-certainty which has being for itself and knows and resolves for itself.

Money has never yet lost the smallest opportunity of proving its own stupidity.

Indeed, it is the great beauty of our science, Chemistry, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility, to those who will be at the easy personal pains of undertaking its experimental investigation.

It is in these things which we neither see nor feel, that it is especially necessary to guard against the extravagancy of our imagination, which forever inclines to step beyond the bounds of truth, and is very difficultly restrained within the narrow line of facts.

Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients. Greece appears to me to be the fountain of knowledge; Rome of elegance.

As manners grow more polished, with the knowledge of good, men attain likewise dexterity in evil. Open rapine becomes less frequent, and violence gives way to cunning. Those who before invaded pastures and stormed houses, now begin to enrich themselves by unequal contracts and fraudulent intromissions.

In light of current events, Tocqueville seems relevant: "Previously Washington had announced this beautiful and just idea: 'The nation that delivers itself to habitual sentiments of love or hatred toward another becomes a sort of slave to them. It is a slave to its hatred or to its love.'" Pg. 218

Addison's style, like a light wine, pleases everybody from the first. Johnson's, like a liquor of more body, seems too strong at first, but, by degrees, is highly relished...

'In short, Sir, I have got no further than this: Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test,'

It is true that every man who receives an opinion on the word of another puts his mind in slavery; but it is a salutary servitude that permits him to make good use of his freedom.

Furthermore, it is not always the capacity that democracy lacks for choosing men of merit, but the desire and the taste.

Either they walk fast or they run slowly, that's what joggers do. It's a forty-year-old man's way of telling the world that he can't do anything right.

The principle of the division of legislative power thus received its last consecration... [t]his theory, nearly ignored in ancient republics, introduced into the world almost haphazardly like most great truths, unknown to several modern peoples, has at length passed into the political science of our day as an axiom.

May I be forgiven the discovery that all moral philosophy so far has been boring and was a soporific and that "virtue" has been impaired more for me by its boring advocates than by anything else, though I am not denying their general utility. It is important that as few people as possible should think about morality; hence it is very important that morality should not one day become interesting.

It was subtle of God to learn Greek when he wished to become an author- and not to learn it better.

He would have thrust the knife into his own breast. He would have been admired in the world and his name never forgotten; but it is one thing to be admired, another to be a guiding star that saves the anguished.

So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it... when it rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its adherents are that their feelings must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach...

Justice has in this case two sides to it, which it is impossible to bring into harmony... the one looks to what it is just that individual should receive, the other to what the community should give. Each, from his own point of view, is unanswerable; and any choice between them on grounds of justice, must be perfectly arbitrary. Social utility alone can decide the preference.

He wasn't sure they were friends, exactly, but she was unfolding a little. He felt like a safecracker who- partly by luck- had sussed out the first digit in a lengthy, arduous combination.

Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral?