Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter; we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.

There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character. I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.

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 difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman is this: The one thinks everything right that is French, while the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.

One is never tired of painting, because you have to set down, not what you already knew, but what you have just discovered.

Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.

Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.

Actors are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream; and the height of their ambition is to be beside themselves.

Words are the only things that last forever.

I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.