The saddest thing that befalls a soul is when it loses faith in god and woman.

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

Eternity doth wear upon her face the veil of time. They only see the veil, and thus they know not what they stand so near!

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.... So are flying twinges of gout, shortness of breath on the hill-side, the fact that even the moderate use of your friend's wines at dinner upsets you. These things are disagreeable because they tell you that you are no longer young—that you have passed through youth, are now in middle age, and faring onward to the shadows in which, somewhere, a grave is hid.

The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.

Not on the stage alone, in the world also, a man's real character comes out best in his asides.

An old novel has a history of its own.