Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust. Hatred alone is immortal.

We often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again.

I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.

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?

The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.

Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.

The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people's virtues.