“Few things are more agreeable to self-love than revenge, and yet no cause so effectually restrains us from revenge as self-love. And this paradox naturally suggests another; that the strength of the community is not unfrequently built upon the weakness of those individuals that compose it.”
Source: Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think
“Revenge is a debt, in the paying of which the greatest knave is honest and sincere, and, so far as he is able, punctual.”
Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
“Revenge is fever in our own blood, to be cured only by letting the blood of another; but the remedy too often produces a relapse, which is remorse--a malady far more dreadful than the first disease, because it is incurable.”
Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
“Some philosophers would give a sex to revenge, and appropriate it almost exclusively to the female mind. But, like most other vices, it is of both genders; yet, because wounded vanity and slighted love are the two most powerful excitements to revenge, it has been thought, perhaps, to rage with more violence in the female heart.”
Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
“No two things differ more than hurry and despatch. Hurry is the mark of a weak mind; despatch of a strong one.”
Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
“Our actions must clothe us with an immortality loathsome or glorious.”
Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
“That is true beauty which has not only a substance, but a spirit; a beauty that we must intimately know, justly to appreciate.”
Source: Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think
“We may anticipate bliss, but who ever drank of that enchanted cup unalloved?”
“I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it.”
Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
“If a book really wants the patronage of a great name, it is a bad book; and if it be a good book, it wants it not.”
Source: Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think