S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.
Self-Conceit
Should the world applaud, we must thankfully receive it as a boon; for if the most deserving of us appear to expect it as a debt, it will never be paid. The world, it has been said, does as much justice to our merits as to our defects, and I believe it; but, after all, none of us are so much praised or censured as we think; and most men would be thoroughly cured of their self-importance if they would only rehearse their own funeral, and walk abroad incognito the very day after that on which they were supposed to have been buried.