Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active; it is concentrated strength.

Keep unscathed the good name; keep out of peril the honor without which even your battered old soldier who is hobbling into his grave on half-pay and a wooden leg would not change with Achilles.

The secret of fashion is to surprise and never to disappoint.

Honest men are the gentlemen of nature.

Genius in the poet, like the nomad of Arabia, ever a wanderer, still ever makes a home where the well or the palm-tree invites it to pitch the tent. Perpetually passing out of himself and his own positive circumstantial condition of being into other hearts and into other conditions, the poet obtains his knowledge of human life by transporting his own life into the lives of others.

The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion.

A woman too often reasons from her heart; hence two-thirds of her mistakes and her troubles.