The busiest of living agents are certain dead men's thoughts.

Great warriors, like great earthquakes, are principally remembered for the mischief they have done.

Marriage, by making us more contented, causes us often to be less enterprising.

Living with a saint is more grueling than being one.

What is taken from the fortune, also, may haply be so much lifted from the soul. The greatness of a loss, as the proverb suggests, is determinable, not so much by what we have lost, as by what we have left.

Mortal beauty stings while it delights.

Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.