Asparagus inspires gentle thoughts.
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and have it found out by accident.
Pain is life – the sharper, the more evidence of life.
We grow gray in our spirit long before we grow gray in our hair.
Riddle of destiny, who can show What thy short visit meant, or know What thy errand here below?
How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself!
The measure of choosing well, is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen.
She unbent her mind afterwards – over a book.
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.
I mean your borrowers of books – those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever.
Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.
You do not play then at whist, sir? Alas, what a sad old age you are preparing for yourself!
How some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me; all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps – good works.
Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free, First flower of the earth and first gem of the sea.
Farewell, farewell to thee, Araby’s daughter! Thus warbled a Peri beneath the dark sea.
Half as sober as a judge.
A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm’s length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance!