Old friends are the great blessings of one's later years. Half a word conveys one's meaning. They have a memory of the same events, have the same mode of thinking. I have young relations that may grow upon me, for my nature is affectionate, but can they grow To Be old friends?

Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.

Virtue knows to a farthing what it has lost by not having been vice.

I shun authors, and would never have been one myself, if it obliged me to keep such bad company.

The curse of modern times is, that almost everything does create controversy.

By deafness one gains in one respect more than one loses; one misses more nonsense than sense.

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.