Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.

Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.

Books wind into the heart.

To speak highly of one with whom we are intimate is a species of egotism. Our modesty as well as our jealousy teaches us caution on this subject.

Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.

Well I've had a happy life.

In what we really understand, we reason but little.