So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts.

You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others.

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality.

I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?

Had be been Shakespeare, he would then have written Troilus and Cressidato brand the offending sex; but being only a little dog, he began to bite them.

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

The person who has stopped being thankful has fallen asleep in life.