The temple of truth is built indeed of stones of crystal, but, inasmuch as men have been concerned in rearing it, it has been consolidated by a cement composed of baser materials.

When dunces call us fools, without proving us to be so, our best retort is to prove them to be fools, without condescending to call them so.

He, therefore, that is dead to all the smiles and to all the frowns of the living, alone is equal to the hazardous task of writing a history of his own times, worthy of being transmitted to times that are to come.

Time is the measurer of all things, but is itself immeasurable, and the grand discloser of all things, but is itself undisclosed.

Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.

Genius, when employed in works whose tendency it is to demoralize and to degrade us, should be contemplated with abhorrence rather than with admiration; such a monument of its power, may indeed be stamped with immortality, but like the Coliseum at Rome, we deplore its magnificence because we detest the purposes for which it was designed.

Man, if he compare himself with all that he can see, is at the zenith of power; but if he compare himself with all that he can conceive, he is at the nadir of weakness.

Pure truth, like pure gold, has been found unfit for circulation, because men have discovered that it is far more convenient to adulterate the truth, than to refine themselves.

The more we know of history, the less shall we esteem the subjects of it.

In the whole course of our observation there is not so misrepresented and abused a personage as death. Some have styled him the king of terrors, when he might with less impropriety have been termed the terror of kings; others have dreaded him as an evil without end, although it was in their own power to make him the end of all evil. He has been vilified as the cause of anguish, consternation, and despair; but these, alas, are things that appertain not unto death, but unto life. How strange a paradox is this, we love the distemper and loathe the remedy, preferring the fiercest buffetings of the hurricane to the tranquility of the harbour.

Slander cannot make the subjects of it either better or worse, it may represent us in a false light, or place a likeness of us in a bad one, but we are the same: not so the slanderer; for calumny always makes the calumniator worse, but the calumniated--never.

If you cannot inspire a woman with love of you, fill her above the brim with love of herself;--all that runs over will be yours.

Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.

Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.

We make a goddess of Fortune ... and place her in the highest heaven. But it is not fortune that is exalted and powerful, but we ourselves that are abject and weak.

What keeps some persons poor? and what has made some others rich? The true answers to these queries would often make the poor man more proud of his poverty, than the rich man is of his wealth, and the rich man more justly ashamed of his wealth, than the poor man unjustly now is, of his poverty.

What is earthly happiness? that phantom of which we hear so much, and see so little; whose promises are constantly given and constantly broken, but as constantly believed; that cheats us with the sound instead of the substance, and with the blossom instead of the fruit. Like Juno, she is a goddess in pursuit, but a cloud in possession.

True friendship is like sound health, the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.

In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and the misery of others, than in the country; for they are constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.

Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it; or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up; or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead; but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us.

There is not a little generalship and stratagem required in the managing and marshalling of our pleasures, so that each shall not mutually encroach to the destruction of all. For pleasures are very voracious, too apt to worry one another, and each, like Aaron's serpent, is prone to swallow up the rest. Thus drinking will soon destroy the power, gaming the means, and sensuality the taste, for other pleasures less seductive, but far more salubrious, and permanent as they are pure.

Nobility of birth does not always insure a corresponding nobility of mind; if it did, it would always act as a stimulus to noble actions; but it sometimes acts as a clog, rather than a spur.

Men are more readily contented with no intellectual light than a little; and wherever they have been taught to acquire some knowledge in order to please others, they have most generally gone on to acquire more, to please themselves.

Nothing is more durable than the dynasty of Doubt; for he reigns in the hearts of all his people, but gives satisfaction to none of them, and yet he is the only despot who can never die, while any of his subjects live.

The next thing to having wisdom ourselves, is to profit by that of others.

Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death.

Religion has treated knowledge sometimes as an enemy, sometimes as a hostage; often as a captive, and more often as a child: but knowledge has become of age; and religion must either renounce her acquaintance, or introduce her as a companion and respect her as a friend.

Unity of opinion, abstractedly considered, is neither desirable, nor a good ... for men may be all agreed in error, and in that case unanimity is an evil.

No sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints.

Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straight forward and simple integrity in another.

Criticism is like champagne, nothing more execrable if bad, nothing more excellent if good; if meagre, muddy, vapid, and sour, both are fit only to engender colic and wind; but if rich, generous, and sparkling, they communicate a genial glow to the spirits, improve the taste, expand the heart, and are worthy of being introduced at the symposium of the gods.

Love is a volcano, the crater of which no wise man will approach too nearly, lest ... he should be swallowed up.

We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason.

Truth lies within the Holy of Holies, in the temple of knowledge, but doubt is the vestibule that leads unto it. Luther began by having his doubts, as to the assumed infallibility of the Pope, and he finished by making himself the corner stone of the reformation. Copernicus, and Newton, doubted the truth of the false systems of others, before they established a true one of their own; Columbus differed in opinion with all the old world, before he discovered a new one; and Galileo's terrestrial body was confined in a dungeon, for having asserted the motion of those bodies that were celestial. In fact, we owe almost all our knowledge, not to those who have agreed, but to those who have differed; and those who have finished by making all others think with them, have usually been those who began by daring to think with themselves; as he that leads a crowd, must begin by separating himself some little distance from it.

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.

A diamond, incarcerated in its subterraneous prison, rough and unpolished, differs not from a common stone.

It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.

Unity of opinion is indeed a glorious and desirable thing, and its circle cannot be too strong and extended, if the centre be truth; but if the centre be error, the greater the circumference, the greater the evil.

Every historian has described the age in which he happened to write, as the worst, because he has only heard of the wickedness of other times, but has felt and seen that of his own.

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