The old lose one of the greatest privileges of man, for they are no longer judged by their contemporaries.

Who is the happiest man? He who is alive to the merit of others, and can rejoice in their enjoyment as if it were his own.

Love has the tendency of pressing together all the lights - all the rays emitted from the beloved object by the burning-glass of fantasy, - into one focus, and making of them one radiant sun without any spots.

A wife is a gift bestowed upon a man to reconcile him to the loss of paradise.

Wanted: A dog that neither barks nor bites, eats broken glass and shits diamonds.

Rash combat oft immortalizes man; if he should fall, he is renowned in song; but after-ages reckon not the ceaseless tears which the forsaken woman sheds. Poets tell us not of the many nights consumed in weeping, or of the dreary days wherein her anguished soul vainly yearns to call her loved one back.

Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will -- it's only action that can make a man.