Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.

Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.

To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.

Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference.

It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.

We should strive to go on in fortune and misfortune like a clock during a thunderstorm.

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.