Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.

The devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was always something to fear and to hate; he supplied the antagonist powers of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm without him.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.

There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.

Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.

A certain excess of animal spirits with thoughtless good-humor will often make more enemies than the most deliberate spite and ill-nature, which is on its guard, and strikes with caution and safety.

An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.