 Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity. |
| There are charms made only for distant admiration. |
| So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something. |
| The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne. |
| Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not. |
| A man will turn over half a library to make one book. |
| Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess. |
| When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. |
| The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it. |
| You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company. |
| A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself. |
| Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified. |
| It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done. |
| To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity. |
