When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.

I know what happiness and what despair are, and I never make a jest of such feelings. Take it, then, but in exchange —

A rogue does not laugh in the same way that an honest man does; a hypocrite does not shed the tears of a man of good faith. All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.

I do not often laugh, sir, as you may perceive by the air of my countenance; but nevertheless, I retain the privilege of laughing when I please.

To save a man and thereby to spare a father's agony and a mother's feelings is not to do a noble deed, it is but an act of humanity.

In this world, all--men, women, and kings--must live for the present. We can only live for the future for God

Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.