Wisdom is seldom gained without suffering.

Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labor equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal super-abundance.

The man who could withstand, with his fellow-men in single line, a charge of cavalry may lose all command of himself on the occurrence of a fire in his own house, because of some homely reminiscence unknown to the observing bystander.

Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?

The most common-place people become highly imaginative when they are in a passion. Whole dramas of insult, injury, and wrong pass before their minds,--efforts of creative genius, for there is sometimes not a fact to go upon.

Every happiness is a hostage to fortune.

A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.