“A positive engagement to marry a certain person at a certain time, at all haps and hazards, I have always considered the most ridiculous thing on earth.”

The less one does, as I long ago observed, the less one can find time to do.

A fashionable wife! Oh! Never will I be anything so heartless! I have pictured for myself a far higher destiny than this. – Will it ever be more than a picture?

In spite of the honestest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting and alas! self-seeking me.

On earth the living have much to bear; the difference is chiefly in the manner of bearing, and my manner of bearing is far from being the best.

Homeopathy – an invention of the Father of Lies! I have tried it and found it wanting. I would swallow their whole doles medicine chest for sixpence, and be sure of finding myself neither better nor worse for it.

I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for.

The longer one lives in this hard world motherless, the more a mother’s loss makes itself felt.

Cracked things often hold out as long as whole things; one takes so much better care of them!

Young children are such nasty little beasts!

Not a hundredth part of the thoughts in my head have ever been or ever will be spoken or written — as long as I keep my senses, at least.

I rely on the promise, God is kind to women, fools, and drunk people.

The only thing that makes one place more attractive to me than another is the quantity of heart I find in it.

How many precious things do we not already possess which others have not – have hardly an idea of! Let us enjoy these, then, and bless God that we are permitted to enjoy them, rather than importune His goodness with vain longings for more.

If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: Byron is dead!

All griefs, when there is no bitterness in them, are soothed down by time.

Youth is so insatiable of happiness, and has such sublimely insane faith in its own power to make happy and be happy!

Infringing upon (or encroaching) the right of a single person, we overthrow (or turn upside down) the whole order on which rest legal agreements; for if we break (or transgress or violate).

One man restored our fortunes by delay. [By skilfully avoiding an engagement, Fabius exhausted the resources of the enemy.]

It is impossible for men engaged in low and groveling pursuits to have noble and generous sentiments. A man’s thought must always follow his employment.

Spiritual people are not those who engage in certain spiritual practices; they are those who draw their life from a conversational relationship with God.

We must either reduce the number of our engagements or increase the number of our troops.

Everyone expects us to have a sense of urgency for life’s big things. Life measures us by how we engage ourselves in the little things.

For want of self-restraint many men are engaged all their lives in fighting with difficulties of their own making.

Men keep their engagements when it is an advantage to both parties not to break them.