What happiness is there which is not purchased with more or less of pain?

Good works may only be beautiful sins, if they are not done in a true spirit.

It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art.

The middle of life is the testing-ground of character and strength.

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always twenty times better.

There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through the ears, as it were, of a skeptic.

Temptations come, as a general rule, when they are sought.