To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

The discovery of a grey hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning - first fallen flake of the coming snows of age - is a disagreeable thing.

If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. It is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death.

If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life.

How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.

A man does not plant a tree for himself; he plants it for posterity.