The cheerful live longest in years, and afterwards in our regards. Cheerfulness is the off-shoot of goodness.

To cultivate a garden is to walk with God.

Adhesion to one idea is monomania; to few, slavery.

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.

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.

Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave.

A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric.