A fine quotation is a diamond in the hand of a man of wit and a pebble in the hand of a fool.

The chief cause of our misery is less the violence of our passions than the feebleness of our virtues.

There is a slowness in affairs which ripens them, and a slowness which rots them.

The man abandoned by his friends, one after another, without just cause, will acquire, the reputation of being hard to please, changeable, ungrateful, unsociable.

Friendship admits of difference of character, as love does that of sex.

Present unhappiness is selfish; past sorrow is compassionate.

Like those statues which must be made larger than "nature" in order that, viewed from below, or from a distance, they may appear to be of the "natural" size, certain truths must be "strained" in order that the public may form a just idea of them.