I incline to Cain's heresy," he used to say quaintly: "I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.

To be truly happy is a question of how we begin, and not how we end, of what we want and not what we have.

To miss the joy is to miss everything.

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.

The mark of a Scot of all classes [is that] he ... remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.

He is not dead, this friend; not dead, Gone some few, trifling steps ahead, And nearer to the end; So that you, too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead.

Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.