E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax Quotes

Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is very good company by the way.

True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.

Nothing would more contribute to make a man wise than to have always an enemy in his view.

The more arguments you win, the less friends you will have

Formality is sufficiently revenged upon the world for being so unreasonably laughed at; it is destroyed, it is true, but it hath the spiteful satisfaction of seeing everything destroyed with it.

I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.

If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers.

If none were to have Liberty but those who understand what it is, there would not be many freed Men in the world.

Gratitude is one of those things that cannot be bought.

The plainer the dress, the greater luster does beauty appear.

The best party is but a kind of conspiracy against the rest of the nation.

Gratitude is one of those things that cannot be bought. It must be born with men, or else all the obligations in the world will not create it.

Friendship cannot live with ceremony, nor without civility.

Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts.

The Triumph of Wit is to make your good Nature subdue your Censure; to be quick in seeing Faults, and slow in exposing them. You are to consider, that the invisible thing called a Good Name, is made up of the Breath of Numbers that speak well of you; so that if by a disobliging Word you silence the meanest, the Gale will be less strong which is to bear up your Esteem.

A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy.

A fool hath no dialogue within himself, the first thought carrieth him without the reply of a second.

The past is the best way to suppose what may come.

Most men's anger about religion is as if two men should quarrel for a lady they neither of them care for.

A man that steps aside from the world and has leisure to observe it without interest and design, thinks all mankind as mad as they think him.

Business is so much lower a thing than learning that a man used to the last cannot easily bring his stomach down to the first.

The several sorts of religion in the world are little more than so many spiritual monopolies.

In our corrupted state, common weaknesses and defects contribute more towards the reconciling us to one another than all the precepts of the philosophers and divines.

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill natured.

Power is so apt to be insolent and Liberty to be saucy, that they are seldom upon good Terms.

A person may dwell so long upon a thought that it may take him a prisoner.