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.

A thought may be very commendable as a thought, but I value it chiefly as a window through which I can obtain insight on the thinker.

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.

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.

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

If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.

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