If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago. - William Hazlitt

Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope; and few are reduced so low as that.

The perceiving our own weaknesses enables us to give others excellent advice, but it does not teach us to to reform ourselves.

Man is, so to speak, an endless and infinitely varied repetition: and if we know what one man feels, we so far know what a thousand feel in the sanctuary of their being. Our feeling of general humanity is at once an aggregate of a thousand different truths, and it is also the same truth a thousand times told.