Belief in a future life is the appetite of reason.

Absence and death are the same -- only that in death there is no suffering.

The habit of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft; the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional.

Greatness, as we daily see it, is unsociable.

Teach him to live unto God and unto thee; and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade.

There are proud men of so much delicacy that it almost conceals their pride, and perfectly excuses it.

Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked.

No ashes are lighter than those of incense, and few things burn out sooner.

I strove with none; for none was worth my strife.

Happiness, like air and water, the other two great requisites of life, is composite. One kind of it suits one man, another kind another. The elevated mind takes in and breathes out again that which would be uncongenial to the baser; and the baser draws life and enjoyment from that which would be putridity to the loftier.

Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth.

Not dancing well, I never danced at all -- and how grievously has my heart ached when others where in the full enjoyment of that conversation which I had no right even to partake.

Every sect is a moral check on its neighbor. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry: on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose ; and neither fan nor burned feather can bring her to herself again.

Glory can be safely despised by those only who have fairly won it.

Moroseness is the evening of turbulence.

Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.

Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's.

The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

Around the child bend all the threeSweet Graces: Faith, Hope, Charity.Around the man bend other faces;Pride, Envy, Malice, are his Graces.