James Boswell Quotes

It's just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.

We are always bored by the very people by whom it is vital not to be bored.

I would imagine that the more time you spend talking to another person, the more you're going to lie to them. So if you spend a lot of time with your relations, you're probably lying a lot to them.

I've always gotten along with guys better.

I have an issue with others ordering for me, and I spend far too long haranguing people that my choices are the best. I apologize for the amount of conversations I have ruined with this attitude.

But you base everything on people you know.

Life is a matter of dealing with other people, in little matters and cataclysmic ones, and that means a series of conversations.

Hell is other people at breakfast.

Sometimes in our relationship to another human being the proper balance of friendship is restored when we put a few grains of impropriety onto our own side of the scale.

As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object -- It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me -- But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.

I have my own way of dividing people, as I suppose most of us have. There are those whom I can talk to, and those whom I can't.

I find people confusing.

You wouldn't know it, from some of the things I've said over the years, but I like people. I do. I like people, but I like them in short bursts. I don't like people for extended periods of time. I'm all right with them for a little while, but once you get up past around... a minute, minute and a half, I gotta get the fuck out of there.

I've had that experience of not liking people very much, but having tremendous respect for them.

The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.

I didn't go in to make friends or not make friends.

We say, 'Shall we meet for a drink?', as though drinking were the main end of the appointment, and the matter of company only incidental, we are so shy about admitting our need for one another.[...]We say, 'Would you like to come for some coffee?', as though it were less frightening to acknowledge that we are heavily dependent on mildly stimulating drinks, than to acknowledge that we are at all dependent on the companionship of other people.

The only problem with seeing people you know is that they know you.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish that people wouldn't get so mad at them.

Women are quite able to make friends with a man; but to preserve such a friendship - that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy

Give your friend cause to blush, and you will be likely to lose him.

The amity that wisdom knits not, folly may easily untie.

All that land is filled with people, every one of them different, and the things they do to each other matter.

It is better to break off a thousand friendships, than to endure the sight of a single enemy.

We don't really make friends, they make us.