“Fame is an undertaker that pays but little attention to the living, but bedizens the dead, furnishes out their funerals, and follows them to the grave”

It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.

Men’s arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.

Wit may do very well for a mistress, but I should prefer reason for a wife.

Women that are the least bashful are often the most modest.

Self-denial is often the sacrifice of one sort of self-love for another.

The worst thing that can be said of the most powerful is that they can take your life; but the same can be said of the most weak.

A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation.

We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.

To admit that there is any such thing as chance, in the common acceptation of the term, would be to attempt to establish a power independent of God.

A house may draw visitors, but it is the possessor alone that can detain them.

We are more inclined to hate one another for points on which we differ, than to love one another for points on which we agree.

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.

Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret.

Immitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Diffidence is the better part of knowledge.

Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.

Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.

The time to hesitate is through no time to wallowin the mire Try now we can only lose and our love become a funeral pyre

Funerals are important rituals. They don’t just recognize that a life has ended; they recognize that a life was lived.

It’s my policy not to review funerals.

Life is lived on its ownother’s shoulders are used only at the time of funeral.

A conservative young man has wound up his life before it was unreeled. We expect old men to be conservative but when a nation’s young men are so, its funeral bell is already rung.

My mum had 14 pregnancies – but only four of us survived. We had a little sister born for a few days and she died. There had to be a funeral.

God is coming to intersect us in our funeral processions.