What is companionship where nothing that improves the intellect is communicated, and where the larger heart contracts itself to the model and dimension of the smaller?

Ambition does not see the earth she treads on: The rock and the herbage are of one substance to her.

We fancy we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.

Fancy is imagination in her youth and adolescence. Fancy is always excursive; imagination, not seldom, is sedate.

Fame, they tell you, is air; but without air there is no life for any; without fame there is none for the best.

In honest truth, a name given to a man is no better than a skin given to him; what is not natively his own falls off and comes to nothing.

Tyrants never perish from tyranny, but always from folly,-when their fantasies have built up a palace for which the earth has no foundation.