“The art of angling, the cruelest, the coldest and the stupidest of pretended sports.”

Always laugh when you can; it is cheap medicine. Merriment is a philosophy not well understood. It is the sunny side of existence.

Till taught by pain, men know not water’s worth.

What an antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and groveling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!

Self praise is no praise at all.

I live, but live to die: and, living, see nothing to make death hateful, save an innate clinging, a loathsome and yet all invincible instinct of life, which I abhor, as I despise myself, yet cannot overcome – and so I live. Would I had never lived!

You gave me the key to your heart, my love, then why did you make me knock?

I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.

Tyranny is for the worst of treasons.

A timid mind is apt to mistake every scratch for a mortal wound.

Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore.

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, sermons and soda water the day after.

Man is in part divine, A troubled stream from a pure source.

Who then will explain the explanation?

It is when we think we lead that we are most led.

Why do they call me misanthrope? Because They hate me, not I them.

Heaven gives its favourites-early death.