Body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to die together.

It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and no very arduous task to astonish them.

We must be careful how we flatter fools too little, or wise men too much, for the flatterer must act the very reverse of the physician, and administer the strongest dose only to the weakest patient.

Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret.

Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority.

Self-denial is often the sacrifice of one sort of self-love for another.

Perhaps that is nearly the perfection of good writing which is original, but whose truth alone prevents the reader from suspecting that it is so; and which effects that for knowledge which the lens effects for the sunbeam, when it condenses its brightness in order to increase its force.