Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.

Live always in the best company when you read.

To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence.

As the French say, there are three sexes - men, women, and clergymen.

Ah, you flavour everything; you are the vanilla of society.

He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.

No furniture so charming as books.

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence. If I lived under the burning sun of the equator, it would be a pleasure to me to think that there were many human beings on the other side of the world who regarded and respected me; I could and would not live if I were alone upon the earth, and cut off from the remembrance of my fellow-creatures. It is not that a man has occasion often to fall back upon the kindness of his friends; perhaps he may never experience the necessity of doing so; but we are governed by our imaginations, and they stand there as a solid and impregnable bulwark against all the evils of life.

Let every man be occupied, and occupied in the highest employment of which his nature is capable, and die with the consciousness that he has done his best.

The fox, when caught, is worth nothing: he is followed for the pleasure of following.