Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Books have always a secret influence on the understanding; we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas: he that reads books of science, though without any desire fixed of improvement, will grow more knowing; he that entertains himself with moral or religious treatises, will imperceptibly advance in goodness; the ideas which are often offered to the mind, will at last find a lucky moment when it is disposed to receive them.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

What is twice read is commonly better remembered that what is transcribed.

Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.

Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.

The trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth.

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high-road that leads him to England.

To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.

To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.

The stream of Time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.

Slander is the revenge of a coward, and dissimulation of his defense.

I live in the crowds of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

Round numbers are always false.

He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dulness in others.

Why, sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature.