The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously; and those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.

To create an unfavourable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said.

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.

From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.

No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

No really great man ever thought himself so.

Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.

Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.