We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature hath set none.

Merit is never so conspicuous as when coupled with an obscure origin, just as the moon never appears so lustrous as when it emerges from a cloud.

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.

He that shrinks from the grave with too great a dread, has an invisible fear behind him pushing him into it.

The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater ennoble it.

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.

Passion doesn't look beyond the moment of its existence.