In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights.

There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.

Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work.

Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)

Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.

The only thing a man knows is himself.

It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, in the wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents, as we so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice.