When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.
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Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.
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If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.
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As universal a practice as lying is, and as easy a one as it seems, I do not remember to have heard three good lies in all my conversation, even from those who were most celebrated in that faculty.
GOETHE IN HIS OLD AGE
[Sidenote: W.M. Thackeray]
In 1831, though he had retired from the world, Goethe would nevertheless very kindly receive strangers. His daughter-in-law's tea-table was always spread for us. We passed hour after hour there, and night after night, with the pleasantest talk and music. We read over endless novels and poems in French, English, and German. My delight in those days was to make caricatures for children. I was touched to find (in 1855) that they were remembered and some even kept to the present time; and very proud to be told, as a lad, that the great Goethe had looked at some of them.
He remained in his private apartments, where only a very few privileged persons were admitted; but he liked to know all that was happening, and interested himself about all strangers. Whenever a countenance took his fancy there was an artist settled in Weimar who made a portrait of it. Goethe had quite a gallery of heads, in black and white, taken by this painter. His house was all over pictures, drawings, casts, statues and medals.