27 Quotes by William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the bark of human happiness is most often wrecked.

One of the most important lessons that experience teaches is that, on the whole, success depends more upon character than upon either intellect or fortune.

The unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.

Passions weaken, but habits strengthen, with age, and it is the great task of youth to set the current of habit and to form the tastes which are most productive of happiness in life.

Physical science has taught us to associate Deity with the normal rather than with the abnormal.

There are times in the lives of most of us, when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.

The simple record of these three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the discourses of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.

Contraction of theological influence has at once been the best measure, and the essential condition of intellectual advance.

Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.