No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken,Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.

What is reading but silent conversation.

Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.

The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.

When a cat flatters ... he is not insincere: you may safely take it for real kindness.

Cats ask plainly for what they want.

Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.

There is no easy path leading out of life and few are the easy ones that lie within it.

We cannot conquer fate and necessity yet we can yield to them in such a manner as to be greater than if we could.

What is reading but silent conversation?

The writings of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Men like snails lose their usefulness when they lose direction and begin to bend.

A man's vanity tells him what is honour a man's conscience what is justice.

We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.

Friendship may sometimes step a few paces in advance of truth.

As there are some flowers which you should smell but slightly to extract all that is pleasant in them ... so there are some men with whom a slight acquaintance is quite sufficient to draw out all that is agreeable a more intimate one would be unsafe and unsatisfactory.

Men like nails lose their usefulness when they lose direction and begin to bend.

States like men have their growth their manhood their decrepitude their decay.

Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for.

Delay of justice is injustice.

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

We talk on principle but we act on interest.

An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

The present like a note in music is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.