Table-Talk

"It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else."

"Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts."

"Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge."

"Scholars, like princes, may learn something by being incognito. Yet we see those who cannot go into a booksellers shop, or bear to be five minutes in a stage-coach, without letting you know who they are. They carry their reputation about with them as the snail does its shell, and sit under its canopy, like the lady in the lobster. I cannot understand this at all. What is the use of a mans always revolving round his own little circle? He must, one should think, be tired of it himself, as well as tire other people."

"First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not unfrequently) to our cost when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or actions. A mans look is the work of years, it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily."

"Any one who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape."

"One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns readers...He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; "lays waste" a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the government itself. He is kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country."

"Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a real confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others."

"If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators."

"The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be."

"The thing is plain. All that men really understand is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know and motives to study or practise. The rest is affectation and imposture."

"Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy."