We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we muse upon it.

It is our relation to circumstances that determine their influence over us. The same wind that blows one ship into port may blow another off shore.

Even when we fancy we have grown wiser, it is only, it may be, that new prejudices have displaced old ones.

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world - they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.

It is some compensation for great evils, that they enforce great lessons.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.