It is in times of difficulty that great nations like great men display the whole energy of their character and become an object of admiration to posterity.
What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be man!
It has sunk him, I cannot say how much it has sunk him in my opinion. So unlike what a man should be!-None of that upright integrity, that strict adherence to truth and principle, that distain of trick and littleness, which a man should display in every transaction of his life.
There are three things which the superior man guards against. In youth ... lust. When he is strong ... quarrelsomeness. When he is old ... covetousness.
Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.
Oh, how I vainly wished to the bearded man in the sky that I was Neapolitan. Why? So I could bring in a fine Neapolitan pest control to help with Queensberry's problem before it gets out of hand.
As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.