Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life.

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

Every action has an ancestor of a thought.

The exceptional life depends not on working harder, but on different, even opposite, actions from habit and the crowd.

The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.

To be a man is to be a nonconformist.

The art of conversation, or the qualification for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment.