“Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave.”

We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.

Activity and sadness are incompatible.

Troubles forereckoned are doubly suffered.

The knowledge beyond all other knowledge is the knowledge how to excuse.

It is some compensation for great evils, that they enforce great lessons.

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

It is with charity as with money–the more we stand in need of it, the less we have to give away.

Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented. Happiness is compounded of richer elements.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.

Cheerfulness is an offshoot of goodness and of wisdom.

The great obstacle to progress is prejudice.

The lively and mercurial are as open books, with the leaves turned down at the notable passages. Their souls sit at the windows of their eyes, seeing and to be seen.

Words, like cannon balls, should go direct to their mark.

Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.

A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.

Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone?

What kind of living will it be when you – Oh, God! Would you like to live with your soul in the grave?

To know and feel all this and not have the words to express it makes a human a grave of his own thoughts.

Cold in the earth and the deeps now piled above thee, Far, far, removed, cold in the dreary grave! Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee, Severed at last byTime’s all-serving wave?

Look on the grave where thou must sleep Thy last, and strongest foe; It is endurance not to weep, If that repose seem woe.

One must accept the fact that we have only one companion in this world, a companion who accompanies us from the cradle to the grave – our own self. Get on good terms with that companion – learn to live with yourself.

Indeed, the hereditary gift of prophecy will go to the grave with me.

Pretty girls make graves.