We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.

Action

The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.

Appearance

First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not infrequently) to our cost, when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or studied actions. A man's look is the work of years; it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily.

Candor

There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body.

Cooperation

We are all of us, more or less, the slaves of opinion.

Custom

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

Deception

Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering the weaknesses of others.

Dress

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

Excellence

One shining quality lends a luster to another, or hides some glaring defect.

Fame

There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!

Faults

It is well that there is no one without a fault; for he would not have a friend in the world.

Friends and Friendship

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

There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our friends. 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.

Grace

Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.

Happiness

Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.

Hypocrisy

The only vice which cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

Injury

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

Laughter

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might of been.

Liberty

The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.

Memory

To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.

Morality

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

Peace

If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.

Poetry and Poets

The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.

Power

If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.

Prejudice

No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.

Reason

To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.

Superstition

Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols -- it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.

Temper

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

Understanding

The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.

Vocation

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

Writers and Writing

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.