"Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy."

"The incentive to ambition is the love of power."

"Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else."

"I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about."

"Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming."

"Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them."

"We can scarcely hate anyone that we know."

"An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may."

"Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse."

"I would like to spend the whole of my life traveling, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend at home."

"Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted."

"There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love."

"The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases."

"People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel."

"There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please, that is, as they please or displease us."

"If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators."

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

"Good temper is one of the greatest preservers of the features."

"No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history."

"Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room."

"The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings."

"To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us."

"The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings."

"Learning is its own exceeding great reward."

"The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough."

"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."

"Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity."

"We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts."

"We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit."

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

"Gracefulness has been defined to be the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul."

"There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion."

"Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote."

"We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation."

"Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food."

"The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right."

"Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress."

"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater."

"Grace in women has more effect than beauty."

"It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse."

"A hair in the head is worth two in the brush."

"Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration."

"Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part."

"Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal."

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

"A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions."

"Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves."

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

"Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity."

"The most insignificant people are the most apt to sneer at others. They are safe from reprisals. And have no hope of rising in their own self esteem but by lowering their neighbors."