Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.

I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.

There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.

A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.

Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly