“Death may beget life, but oppression can beget nothing other than itself.”

There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

A heart well worth winning, and well won. A heart that, once won, goes through fire and water for the winner, and never changes, and is never daunted.

Remember, to the last, that while there is life there is hope.

The ocean asks for nothing but those who stand by her shores gradually attune themselves to her rhythm.

My advice is to never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time.

There is something in sickness that breaks down the pride of manhood.

Once a gentleman, and always a gentleman.

Time and tide will wait for no man, saith the adage. But all men have to wait for time and tide.

For not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent’s love.

Family not only need to consist of merely those whom we share blood, but also for those whom we’d give blood.

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it to anyone else.

There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.

Napoleon Bonaparte, on finding a dog beside the body of his dead master, licking his face and howling, on a moonlit field after a battle. Napoleon was haunted by this scene until his own death.

Divorce was emotionally traumatic for me. It was the death of a dream. I was in fairytale land, and the reality of it wasn’t so. But I don’t really like talking about it anymore, because it feels like a thousand lifetimes ago, and also it makes me look desperate like I need it for attention.

People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.

It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.

Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him.

Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.