Men are apt to overvalue the tongues, and to think they have made considerable progress in learning when they have once overcome these; yet in reality there is no internal worth in them, and men may understand a thousand languages without being the wiser.
Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.
When the People contend for their Liberty, they seldom get anything by their Victory but new masters. Power is so apt to be insolent and Liberty to be saucy, that they are very seldom upon good Terms.
When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only - What a crib from Rochefoucauld!
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.
The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.
Malice is of the boomerang character, and is apt to turn upon the projector.
Novelty serves us for a kind of refreshment, and takes off from that satiety we are apt to complain of in our usual and ordinary entertainments.
Ability in man is an apt good, if it be applied to good ends.
The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.
I go out with actresses because I'm not apt to marry one.
If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art. . . the minute painter would be more apt to succeed. But it is not the eye, it is the mind which the painter of genius desires to address.
I am not myself apt to be alarmed at innovations recommended by reason. That dread belongs to those whose interests or prejudices shrink from the advance of truth and science.
Businesses planned for service are apt to succeed businesses planned for profit are apt to fail.
The world is terribly apt to take people at their own valuation.
Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.
A knowledge of general literature is one of the evidences of an enlightened mind; and to give an apt quotation at a fitting time, proves that the mind is stored with sentential lore that can always be used to great advantage by its possessor.
Encourage & support your kids because "Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.
Human life very much resembles a game of chess: for, as in the latter, while a gamester is too attentive to secure himself very strongly on one side of the board, he is apt to leave an unguarded opening on the other, so doth it often happen in life.