Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.

No young man ever thinks he shall die.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof. The throwing out [of] malicious imputations against any character leaves a stain, which no after-refutation can wipe out. To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said. The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.

There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary.

Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themselves for a while from, the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth.

To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant.