Life is like our game at whist ... I don't enjoy the game much, but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

A good horse makes short miles.

For character too is a process and an unfolding. . . among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful. . . .

Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.

It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations.

...there's never a garden in all the parish but what there's endless waste in it for want o' somebody as could use everything up. It's what I think to myself sometimes, as there need nobody run short o' victuals if the land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what could find it's way to a mouth.