A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.

Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

Silence is the only Voice of our God.

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.

I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.

Whatever my fate, I'll go to it laughing.