I have wrought great use out of evil tools.

The distinguishing trait of people accustomed to good society is a calm, imperturbable quiet which pervades all their actions and habits, from the greatest to the least. They eat in quiet, move in quiet, live in quiet, and lose their wife, or even their money, in quiet; while low persons cannot take up either a spoon or an affront without making such an amazing noise about it.

In how large a proportion of creatures is existence composed of one ruling passion, the most agonizing of all sensations--fear.

A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool.

If aught be worse than failure from overstress of a life's prime purpose, it is to sit down content with a little success.

Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.

It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains.