A good marriage ... is a sweet association in life: full of constancy, trust, and an infinite number of useful and solid services and mutual obligations.

I do not understand; I pause; I examine.

The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little.

Age imprints more wrinkles a in the mind, than it does in the face, and souls are never, or very rarely seen, that in growing old do not smell sour and musty. Man moves all together, both towards his perfection and decay.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden.

Natural inclinations are assisted and reinforced by education, but they are hardly ever altered or overcome.

Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me--a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books.