Don't wait to be happy to laugh... You may die and never have laughed.

Misers are neither relations, nor friends, nor citizens, nor Christians, nor perhaps even human beings.

He who excels in his art so as to carry it to the utmost height of perfection of which it is capable may be said in some measure to go beyond it: his transcendent productions admit of no appellations.

Criticism is as often a trade as a science, requiring, as it does, more health than wit, more labour than capacity, more practice than genius.

You think him to be your dupe; if he feigns to be so who is the greater dupe, he or you?

From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race.

When a secret is revealed, it is the fault of the man who confided it.