t
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.

We should have a glorious conflagration if all who cannot put _fire_
into their works would only consent to put their works into the
_fire_.--COLTON.

Books, dear books,
Have been, and are my comforts; morn and night,
Adversity, prosperity, at home,
Abroad, health, sickness--good or ill report,
The same firm friends; the same refreshment rich,
And source of consolation.
--DR.