I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

Most minds are the slaves of external circumstances, and conform to any hand that undertakes to mould them.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

Life, to be worthy of a rational being, must be always in progression; we must always purpose to do more or better than in time past.

In bed we laugh, in bed we cry, and born in bed, in bed we die; the near approach a bed may show of human bliss to human woe.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.