Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.