Thoughts must come naturally, like wild-flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed, even although aided by the leaf-mould of your past.

It is a characteristic of pleasure that we can never recognize it to be pleasure till after it is gone.

A single soul is richer than all the worlds.

One never hugs one's good luck so affectionately as when listening to the relation of some horrible misfortunes which has overtaken others.

Your death and my death are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either.

And in any case, to the old man, when the world becomes trite, the triteness arises not so much from a cessation as from a transference of interest. What is taken from this world is given to the next. The glory is in the east in the morning, it is in the west in the afternoon, and when it is dark the splendour is irradiating the realm of the under-world. He would only follow.

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