“But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flower, it’s bloom is shed; Or, like the snow-fall in the river, A moment white, then melts forever.”

I look on the opposite sex with something like the admiration with which I regard the starry sky on a frosty December night. I admire the beauty of the Creator’s workmanship, I am charmed with the wild but graceful eccentricity of the motions, and then I wish both of them goodnight.

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

How wretched is the person who hangs on by the favors of the powerful.

Farewell, my friends! farewell, my foes! My peace with these, my love with those. The bursting tears my heart declare; Farewell, the bonnie banks of Ayr.

God knows, I’m not the thing I should be, Nor am I even the thing I could be, But twenty times I rather would be An atheist clean, Than under gospel colours hid be Just for a screen.

When matters are desperate we must put on a desperate face.

Learn taciturnity and let that be your motto!

I want someone to laugh with me, someone to be grave with me, someone to please me and help my discrimination with his or her own remark, and at times, no doubt, to admire my acuteness and penetration.

Your lines, I maintain it, are poetry, and good poetry. Friendship had I been so blest as to have met with you in time, might have led me – God of love only knows where.

The wisest man the warl’ e’er saw, He dearly loved the lasses, O.

Be Briton still to Britain true, Among oursel’s united; For never but by British hands Maun British wrangs be righted.

I pick my favourite quotations and store them in my mind as ready armour, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.

O Scotia! my dear, my native soil! For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An’ foolish notion.

The best laid plans take 40 years to complete.

I have a hundred times wished that one could resign life as an officer resigns a commission.

Can hope bloom in the shade? Can time give back what it takes away? I once saw the answers to life in your eyes; now I can remember the words to goodbye.

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming… suddenly you find – at the age of 50, say – that a whole new life has opened before you.

Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?

I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow.

Life and love are very precious when both are in full bloom.

In my garden, after a rainfall, you can faintly, yes, hear the breaking of new blooms.

From the ashes I rise, I am blooming into something radiant.

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.