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Death is the only monastery; the tomb is the only cell, and the grave that adjoins the convent is the bitterest mock of its futility.
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The bold sympathize with the bold; and in great hearts, there is always a certain friendship for a gallant foe.
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A sense of contentment makes us kindly and benevolent to others; we are not chafed and galled by cares which are tyrannical because original. We are fulfilling our proper destiny, and those around us feel the sunshine of our own hearts.
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Each man forms his duty according to his predominant characteristic; the stern require an avenging judge; the gentle, a forgiving father. Just so the pygmies declared that Jove himself was a pygmy.
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Fate whirls on the bark, and the rough gale sweeps from the rising tide the lazy calm of thought.
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All doubt is cowardice - all trust is brave.
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One vice worn out makes us wiser than fifty tutors.
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The fewer blows, the better. Brave men fight if they must; wise men never fight if they can help it.
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Dandies, when first-rate, are generally very agreeable men.
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Fiction may be said to be the caricature of history.
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Man hazards the condition and loses the virtues of a freeman, in proportion as he accustoms his thoughts to view without anguish or shame, his lapse into the bondage of debtor.
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A pipe is the fountain of contemplation, the source of pleasure, the companion of the wise; and the man who smokes, thinks like a philosopher and acts like a Samaritan.
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It is a wonderful advantage to a man, in every pursuite or avocation, to secure an adviser in a sensible woman. In woman there is at once a subtle delicacy of tact, and a plain soundness of judgement, which are rarely combined to an equal degree in man. A woman, if she be really your friend, will have a sensitive regard for your character, honor, repute. She will seldom counsel you to do a shabby thing: for a woman friend always desires to be proud of you.
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Nature never gives to a living thing capacities not particularly meant for its benefit and use. If Nature gives to us capacities to believe that we have a Creator whom we never saw, of whom we have no direct proof, who is kind and good and tender beyond all that we know of kindness and goodness and tenderness on earth, it is because the endowment of capacities to conceive a Being must be for our benefit and use; it would not be for our benefit and use if it were a lie.
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Art employs method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth; but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct, while in the first it escapes from sight amid the shows of color and the curves of grace.
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Though no participator in the joy of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practise toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost.
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Say what we will, we may be sure that ambition is an error. Its wear and tear on the heart are never recompensed.
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It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
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Debt is to man what the serpent is to the bird; its eye fascinates, its breath poisons, its coil crushes sinew and bone, its jaw is the pitiless grave.
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Nothing can constitute good-breeding that has not good-nature for its foundation.
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Despair makes victims sometimes victors.
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To dispense with ceremony is the most delicate mode of conferring a compliment.
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We may observe in humorous authors that the faults they chiefly ridicule have often a likeness in themselves. Cervantes had much of the knight-errant in him; Sir George Etherege was unconsciously the Fopling Flutter of his own satire; Goldsmith was the same hero to chambermaids, and coward to ladies that he has immortalized in his charming comedy; and the antiquarian frivolities of Jonathan Oldbuck had their resemblance in Jonathan Oldbuck's creator.
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Say what we will, you may be sure that ambition is an error; its wear and tear of heart are never recompensed, -it steals away the freshness of life, -it deadens its vivid and social enjoyments, -it shuts our souls to our own youth, -and we are old ere we remember that we have made a fever and a labor of our raciest years.