Life works upon a compensating balance, and the happiness we gain in one direction we lose in another.

We drink [to] one another's health and spoil our own.

I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.

It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.

Splendid cheeses they were, ripe and mellow, and with a two hundred horse-power scent about them that might have been warranted to carry three miles, and knock a man over at two hundred yards.

If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.

Life is a thing to be lived, not spent; to be faced, not ordered. Life is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing; it is a game of cards, one's hand by skill to be made the best of.