To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said.

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

Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.

Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.

I am then never less alone than when alone

The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.

Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid.