Man's cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron ring. You can go round and round it, you can polish it highly, you can even flatten it a little on one side, whereby you will make it bulge out the other, but you will NEVER, while the world endures and man is man, increase its total circumference.

Truly wealth, which men spend all their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing at the last.

Passion is like the lightning, it is beautiful, and it links the earth to heaven, but alas it blinds!

How can a world be good in which Money is the moving power, and Self-interest the guiding star?

As for the girl, since she is well favoured, she shall brew the king's beer, and be numbered amongst the king's wives-unless, indeed, he is pleased to give her to me.

It is a hard thing when one has shot sixty-five lions or more, as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing, and putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don't like that. This is by the way.

The acorn of ambition often grows into an oak from which men hang.