“Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.”

“To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again...books which I have read carefully a few years before. I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it.”

“Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.”

“I listen with attention to the judgment of all men;but so far as I can remember,I have followed none but my own.”

“Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”

“We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.”

“To censure my own faults in some other person seems to me no more incongruous than to censure, as I often do, another's in myself. They must be denounced everywhere, and be allowed no place of sanctuary.”