Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.
Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner...
Let any one speak long enough, he will get believers.
The essence of love is kindness.
By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.
Wine is bottled poetry.
Then it was that there came into my head the first of the mad notions that contributed so much to saving our lives.
Ah sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth and none or almost none for the disenchantments of age.
The Saints are the Sinners who keep on trying.
Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
In the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appe...
He recollected his courage.
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and fall.
Courage is the footstool of the Virtues upon which they stand.
Everyone lives by selling something.
Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on th...
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.