A friend is a person who goes around saying nice things about you behind your back.

The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to hermother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

The course of everything goes to teach us faith.

My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is said that words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption.

I have been told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion.

Greatness is a property for which no man gets credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.