The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape

How fatally the entire want of humor cripples the mind.

Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.

It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!

What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.

I make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more.

If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich.