As success converts treason into legitimacy, so belief converts fiction into fact, and "nothing is but what is not.

It is surely one of the strangest of our propensities to mark out those we love best for the worst usage; yet we do, all of us. We can take any freedom with a friend; we stand on no ceremony with a friend.

Man will take anything you like, except warning.

It is an odd mode of diminishing one's own weakness to ask a friend to lend us the equal force of his.

What if two negatives make an affirmative ...does it follow that two nobodies shall be some body?

Everybody's word is worth Nobody's taking.

The ancient gentleman who has seen the world, who is profoundly experienced, and much too deep to be the dupe of an age so shallow as this, is to be won by an admiring glance at the brilliancy of his knee-buckle; praise his very pigtail, and you may lead him by it.