There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

The same common sense which makes an author write good things, makes him dread they are not good enough to deserve reading.

Discourtesy does not spring merely from one bad quality, but from several--from foolish vanity, from ignorance of what is due to others, from indolence, from stupidity, from distraction of thought, from contempt of others, from jealousy.

I do not doubt but that genuine piety is the spring of peace of mind; it enables us to bear the sorrows of life, and lessens the pangs of death: the same cannot be said of hypocrisy.

Love and friendship exclude each other.

Life is a kind of sleep: old men sleep longest, nor begin to wake but when they are to die.

Every hour in itself, as it respects us in particular, is the only one we can call our own.