A cold-blooded learned man might, for anything I know, compose in his closet an eloquent book; but in public discourse, arising out of sudden occasions, he could by no possibility be eloquent. [ Erskine ]

Have you known how to compose your manners? You have done a great deal more than he who has composed books. Have you known how to take repose? You have done more than he who has taken cities and empires. [ Montaigne ]

Have you known how to compose your manners, you have achieved a great deal more than he who has composed books. Have you known how to attain repose, you have achieved more than he who has taken cities and subdued empires. [ Montaigne ]

Genius has privileges of its own; it selects an orbit for itself; and be this never so eccentric, if it is indeed a celestial orbit, we mere star-gazers must at last compose ourselves, must cease to cavil at it, and begin to observe it and calculate its laws. [ Carlyle ]

Friendship is not a state of feeling whose elements are specifically different from those which compose every other. The emotions we feel toward a friend are the same in kind with those we experience on other occasions; but they are more complex and more exalted. [ R. Hall ]

The powers of music are felt or known by all men, and are allowed to work strangely upon the mind and the body, the passions and the blood; to raise joy and grief; to give pleasure and pain; to cure diseases, and the mortal sting of the tarantula; to give motions to the feet as well as the heart; to compose disturbed thoughts; to assist and heighten devotion itself. [ Sir W. Temple ]

The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all - but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered. [ Coleridge ]