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.

(...) the tree forsakes not the flower: the flower falls from the tree.

that Englishman who came to challenge me three or four months ago, and whom I killed to stop him bothering me

It is rare that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.

Haste is a poor counselor

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.

On what slender threads do life and fortune hang.