Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.

That which anyone has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportional eagerness and haste.

We are not hypocrites in our sleep.

Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night.

A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.

Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.

They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors.