So ambitious men, if they find the way open for their rising, and still get forward, they are rather busy than dangerous; but if they be checked in their desires, they become secretly discontent, and look upon men and matters with an evil eye, and are best pleased, when things go backward.
Everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.
Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.
Hasten [to examine] thy own ruling faculty and that of the universe and that of thy neighbor: thy own, that thy may make it just; and that of the universe, that thou mayst remember of what thou art a part; and that of thy neighbor, that thy mayst know whether he has acted ignorantly or with knowledge, and that thou mayst also consider that his ruling faculty is akin to thine.
That which makes the man no worse than he was makes his life no worse: it has no power to harm, without or within.
Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure. There is no taste which deserves the epithet good, unless it be the taste for such employments which, to the pleasure actually produced by them, conjoin some contingent or future utility: there is no taste which deserves to be characterized as bad, unless it be a taste for some occupation which has mischievous tendency.
There's no pleasure ì living if you're to be corked up for ever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.
Broad-based upon her people's will,
And compass'd by the inviolate sea.