It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to d — Table-Talk

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."