Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone — but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.

More from "On The Conduct of Life" (1822)

• Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits, and you will pass for a fine man.
• You know more of a road by having travelled it then by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
• All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it.
• Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
• Grace has been defined the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
• Grace is the absence of every thing that indicates pain or difficulty, or hesitation or incongruity.