It is boorish to live ungraciously: the giving is the hardest part; what does it cost to add a smile?

We should laugh before being happy, for fear of dying without having laughed.

A good author, and one who writes carefully, often discovers that the expression of which he has been in search without being able to discover it, and which he has at last found, is that which was the most simple, the most natural, and which seems as if it ought to have presented itself at once, without effort, to the mind.

Pure friendship is something which men of an inferior intellect can never taste.

Days, months, years fly away, and irrecoverably sink in the abyss of time.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.