Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise.

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.

I love the chill October days, when the brown leaves lie thick and sodden underneath your feet ... the evenings in late autumn time, when the white mist creeps across the fields, making it seem as though old Earth, feeling the night air cold to its poor bones, were drawing ghostly bedclothes round its withered limbs.

We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without.

The world must be rather a rough place for clever people. Ordinary folk dislike them, and as for themselves, they hate each other most cordially.

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

A glass of wine often makes me a better man than hearing a sermon.