The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.

Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?

To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.

The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.