If there be any one habit which more than another is the dry rot of all that is high and generous in youth, it is the habit of ridicule.

No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable.[to feel unhappy you need the time to consider how your lot could be better]

Hopes and regrets are the sweetest links of existence.

I cannot see why a taste for the country should be held so very indispensable a requisite for excellence; but really people talk of it as if it were a virtue, and as if an opposite opinion was, to say the least of it, very immoral.

What is life? A gulf of troubled waters, where the soul, like a vexed bark, is tossed upon the waves of pain and pleasure by the wavering breath of passions.

Suicide and antipathy to fires in a bedroom seem to be among the national characteristics. Perhaps the same moral cause may originate both.

Perhaps, from an innate desire of justification, sorrow always exaggerates itself. Memory is quite one of Job's friends; and the past is ever ready to throw its added darkness on the present.