Interesting Quotations

Dear friends

I have chosen for you some fascinating and entertaining selection of quotations from some of the world's wittiest and wisest people – writers, philosophers, statesmen, actors and many others. I hope you like them.



Quotations on Friendship



The perfect friendship is that between good men alike in their virtue.
Aristotle, the Nicomachean Ethics

The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.
Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum

If you want enemies, excel others; if you want friends, let others excel you.
Charles Caleb Colton, Ibid

A true friend unbosoms freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably.
William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude




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Quotations on Love



All the privilege I claim from my own sex … is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone
Jane Austen, Persuasion

Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair.
William Blake, Songs of Experience: The Clod and the Pebble

And the moral of that is – "Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love that makes the world go round."
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Pans of love be sweeter far
Than all other pleasures are.
John Dryden, The Indian Emperor




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Quotations on Happiness


Happiness in this world, when it comes, it comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
Nathaniel Hwathorne, American Notebooks

Perfect happiness, even in memory, is not common.
Jane Austen, Emma

We are more interested in making others believe that we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves.
Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque




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Quotations on Beauty



She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty


If you get simple beauty, and nought else.
You get about the best God invents.
Robert Browning, Fra Lippo Lippi


Everyone has its beauty but not everyone sees it.
Confucius, Analects


Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll … but merit wins the soul.
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock.



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