Urgent necessity prompts many to do things, at the very thoughts of which they perhaps would start at other times.

Mere flimflam stories, and nothing but shams and lies.

To withdraw is not to run away, and to stay is no wise action, when there's more reason to fear than to hope.

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Everyone is as God has made him, and oftentimes a great deal worse.

'Tis said of love that it sometimes goes, sometimes flies; runs with one, walks gravely with another; turns a third into ice, and sets a fourth in a flame: it wounds one, another it kills: like lightning it begins and ends in the same moment: it makes that fort yield at night which it besieged but in the morning; for there is no force able to resist it.

I do not deny that what happened to us is a thing worth laughing at. But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.