Dandies, when first-rate, are generally very agreeable men.

He whom God hath gifted with a love of retirement possesses, as it were, an extra sense.

People praise us behind our backs, but we hear them not; few before our faces, and who is not suspicious of the truth of such praise?

Say what we will, we may be sure that ambition is an error. Its wear and tear on the heart are never recompensed.

There is a world of science necessary in choosing books. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel, or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he was about.

Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud--and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.