Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgment and friendship are like being enlivened.

Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility.

Mutual complacency is the atmosphere of conjugal love.

Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

He that compares what he has done with what he has left undone, will feel the effect which must always follow the comparison of imagination with reality; he will look with contempt on his own unimportance, and wonder to what purpose he came into the world; he will repine that he shall leave behind him no evidence of his having been, that he has added nothing to the system of life, but has glided from youth to age among the crowd, without any effort for distinction.