Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.

Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.

Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter, we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.

If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.

Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.