If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them; if we are constantly with them, we despise them.

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

The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.

It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.

There is room enough in human life to crowd almost every art and science in it. If we pass ""no day without a line""-visit no place without the company of a book-we may with ease fill libraries or empty them of their contents. The more we do, the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.

The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.

Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.