Concerning the utility of Rhetoric, it is to be observed that it divides itself into two; first, whether Oratorical skill be, on the whole, a public ….

To be always thinking about your manners is not the way to make them good; the very perfection of manners is not to think about yourself..

Falsehood, like the dry-rot, flourishes the more in proportion as air and light are excluded..

Ethical maxims are bandied about as a sort of current coin of discourse, and, being never melted down for use, those that are of base metal are never….

As there are dim-sighted people who live in a sort of perpetual twilight, so there are some who, having neither much clearness of head nor a very ele….

Eloquence is relative. One can no more pronounce on the eloquence of any composition than the wholesomeness of a medicine, without knowing for whom i….

Even supposing there were some spiritual advantage in celibacy, it ought to be completely voluntary..

Falsehood is difficult to be maintained. When the materials of a building are solid blocks of stone, very rude architecture will suffice; but a struc….

Do you want to know the man against whom you have most reason to guard yourself? Your looking-glass will give you a very fair likeness of his face..

A man will never change his mind if he have no mind to change..

There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true..

As a science, logic institutes an analysis of the process of the mind in reasoning, and investigating the principles on which argumentation is conduc….

When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigoro….

When a man says he wants to work, what he means is that he wants wages..

Persecution is not wrong because it is cruel; but it is cruel because it is wrong..

Reason can no more influence the will, and operate as a motive, than the eyes which show a man his road can enable him to move from place to place, o….

A man who gives his children habits of industry provides for them better than by giving them fortune..

One way in which fools succeed where wise men fail is that through ignorance of the danger they sometimes go coolly about a hazardous business..

Vices and frailties correct each other, like acids and alkalies. If each vicious man had but one vice, I do not know how the world could go on..

Christianity, contrasted with the Jewish system of emblems, is truth in the sense of reality, as substance is opposed to shadows, and, contrasted wit….

When any person of really eminent virtue becomes the object of envy, the clamor and abuse by which he is assailed is but the sign and accompaniment o….