I want to do everything in the world that can be done.

American gentlemen are a cross between English and French men, and yet really altogether like neither. They are more refined and modest than Frenchmen, and less manly, shy, and rough, than Englishmen. Their brains are finer and flimsier, their bodies less robust and vigorous than ours. We are the finer animals, and they the subtler spirits. Their intellectual tendency is to excitement and insanity, and ours to stagnation and stupidity.

The death I should prefer would be to break my neck off the back of a good horse at a full gallop on a fine day.

Better trust all, and be deceived, And weep that trust and that deceiving, Than doubt one heart, that if believed Had blessed one's life with true believing.

When marriage is what it ought to be, it is indeed the very happiest condition of existence.

Politics of all sorts, I confess, are far beyond my limited powers of comprehension. Those of this country as far as I have been able to observe, resolve themselves into two great motives. The aristocratic desire of elevation and separation, and the democratic desire of demolishing and levelling.

Rome ... seems to me the place in the world where one can best dispense with happiness.