“He should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin.”

Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.

When men think much, they can rarely decide.

Of Dickens’ style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules…

Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.

Of all hatreds that the world produces, a wife’s hatred for her husband, when she does hate him, is the strongest.

Let a man be of what side he may in politics, unless he be much more of a partisan than a patriot, he will think it well that there should be some equity of division in the bestowal of crumbs of comfort.

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?…Was ever anything so civil?

The concrete sound that meets the ears of any outside listener is always a sound of women’s voices?

I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything.

When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper.

If a cook can’t make soup between two and seven, she can’t make it in a week.

Audacity in wooing is a great virtue, but a man must measure even his virtues.

When it comes to money nobody should give up anything.

I am not fit to marry. I am often cross, and I like my own way, and I have a distaste for men.

My sweetheart is to me more than a coined hemisphere.

For there is no folly so great as keeping one’s sorrows hidden.

The Italian people are disciplined, silent and calm, they work and know that there is a Government which governs, and know, above all, that if this Government hits cruelly certain sections of the Italian people, it does not so out of caprice, but from the supreme necessity of national order.

The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training – sacrifice.

It is a gentle and affectionate thought, that in immeasurable height above us, at our first birth, the wreath of love was woven with sparkling stars for flowers.

Above all else, never think you’re not good enough.

Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance.

If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?

We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience.

If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?