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" It is one of the oldest maxims of moral prudence: Do not, by aspiring to what is impracticable, lose the opportunity of doing the good you can effect! "

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" It is necessary for him who would endure existence with patience that he should conceive himself to be something - that he should be persuaded he is not a cipher in the muster-roll of man. "

" No one can display or can cultivate a fervent zeal in the mere repetition of a form. "

" What can be more clear and sound in explanation, than the love of a parent to his child? "

" Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him. "

" Perhaps the majority of human beings never think of standing by themselves, and choosing their own employments, till the sentence has been regularly promulgated to them, 'It is time for you to take care of yourself.' "

" What are gold and jewels and precious utensils? Mere dross and dirt. The human face and the human heart, reciprocations of kindness and love, and all the nameless sympathies of our nature - these are the only objects worth being attached to. "

" Harshness and unkindness are relative. The appearance of them may be the fruits of the greatest kindness. "

" Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education. "

" Religion is the most important of all things: the great point of discrimination that divides the man from the brute. It is our special prerogative that we can converse with that which we cannot see and believe in that the existence of which is reported to us by none of our senses. "

" Love conquers all difficulties, surmounts all obstacles, and effects what to any other power would be impossible. "

" The world is all alike. Those that seem better than their neighbours are only more artful. They mean the same thing, though they take a different road. "

" My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image. "

" I was brought up in great tenderness, and though my mind was proud to independence, I was never led to much independence of feeling. "

" I am now in the full maturity of my age and vigor of my mind. Persons of various descriptions have repeatedly solicited me to turn my mind to dramatical composition. It was, indeed, the first amusement of my thoughts in my school-boy cell. "

" There are so many ways in which the heart of man conceals itself from man! "

" The most desirable state of mankind is that which maintains general security with the smallest encroachment upon individual independence. "

" The four principal oral instructors to whom I feel my mind indebted for improvement were Joseph Fawcet, Thomas Holcroft, George Dyson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "

" Since it is one of the great attributes of our species to be susceptible of improvement and capable of experiencing the most beneficial changes, for this reason what are vulgarly called 'venerable establishments' will often range themselves in opposition to the best interests of the community. "

" When the calamity we feared is already arrived, or when the expectation of it is so certain as to shut out hope, there seems to be a principle within us by which we look with misanthropic composure on the state to which we are reduced, and the heart sullenly contracts and accommodates itself to what it most abhorred. "

" No man knows the value of innocence and integrity but he who has lost them. "

" Self-deception is so far from impossible that it is one of the most ordinary phenomena with which we are acquainted. Nothing is more usual than for a man to impute his actions to honorable motives when it is nearly demonstrable that they flowed from some corrupt and contemptible force. "

" In the two novels I have published, it was my fortune at different times, and from different persons, to hear the most unqualified censure long before it was possible for me to hear the voice of the public. But my temper was not altered, nor my courage subdued. "

" In the summer of 1791, I gave up my concern in the 'New Annual Register,' the historical part of which I had written for seven years, and abdicated, I hope forever, the task of performing a literary labour, the nature of which should be dictated by anything but the promptings of my own mind. "

" Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions. "

" How different a creature is man in society and man in solitude! "

" During my academical life, and from this time forward, I was indefatigable in my search after truth. I read all the authors of greatest repute, for and against the Trinity, original sin, and the most disputed doctrines, but I was not yet of an understanding sufficiently ripe for impartial decision, and all my inquiries terminated in Calvinism. "

" We cannot perform our tasks to the best of our power, unless we think well of our own capacity. "

" Give energy, and mental exertion will always have attraction enough. "

" Everything understood by the term co-operation is in some sense an evil. "

" He has no right to his life when his duty calls him to resign it. Other men are bound... to deprive him of life or liberty, if that should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil. "