A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes there is no virtue but on his own side.—­Addison.

Show me the man who would go to heaven alone if he could, and in that man I will show you one who will never be admitted into heaven.—­Feltham.

Biography.—­The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best.  A noble life put fairly on record acts like an inspiration to others.—­Samuel smiles.

Biography, especially the biography of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions from poverty and obscurity to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study.  Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records.—­Horace Mann.

To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.—­Plutarch.

Boasting.—­Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed; nature never pretends.—­Lavater.

Where boasting ends, there dignity begins.—­Young.

A gentleman that loves to hear himself talk will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month.—­Shakespeare.

Men of real merit, and whose noble and glorious deeds we are ready to acknowledge, are yet not to be endured when they vaunt their own actions.—­Aeschines.

The less people speak of their greatness the more we think of it.—­Bacon.

Conceit, more rich in matter than in words,
Brags of his substance, not of ornament: 
They are but beggars that can count their worth. 

          
                          —­Shakespeare.

Books.—­When friends grow cold, and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and commonplace, books only continue the unaltered countenance of happier days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived hope nor deserted sorrow.—­Washington Irving.

No book can be so good as to be profitable when negligently read.  —­Seneca.

He who loves not books before he comes to thirty years of age, will hardly love them enough afterward to understand them.—­Clarendon.

I like books.  I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get in their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses.—­O.W.  Holmes.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings—­as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.—­Longfellow.

Nothing can supply the place of books.  They are cheering or soothing companions in solitude, illness, affliction.  The wealth of both continents would not compensate for the good they impart.—­Channing.