The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate --a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes --he may be left, in a month, destitute of all.

A friend is somebody who loves us with understanding, as well as emotion.

A hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so.

Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards

There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign.

To have suffered ... sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth and has to be learned in the fire.