Mistrust all men, and slay him whom thou mistrustest overmuch; and as for women, flee from them, for they are evil, and in the end will destroy thee.
Passion is like the lightning, it is beautiful, and it links the earth to heaven, but alas it blinds!
Wealth is good, and if it comes our way we will take it; but a gentleman does not sell himself for wealth.
The food that memory gives to eat is bitter to the taste, and it is only with the teeth of hope that we can bear to bite it.
There are things and there are faces which, when felt or seen for the first time, stamp themselves upon the mind like a sun image on a sensitized plate and there remain unalterably fixed.
The great wheel of Fate rolls on like a Juggernaut, and crushes us all in turn, some soon, some late.
Truly time should be measured by events, and not by the lapse of hours.
Laughter and bitterness are often the veils with which a sore heart wraps its weakness from the world.
It is awkward to listen to oneself being praised, and I was always a shy man.
The Almighty gave us our lives, and I suppose He meant us to defend them, at least I have always acted on that, and I hope it will not be brought up against me when my clock strikes.
I have never observed that the religious are more eager to die than the rest of us poor mortals.
Truly wealth, which men spend all their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing at the last.
Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.
How can a world be good in which Money is the moving power, and Self-interest the guiding star?
Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another!
Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.
Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, ‘See, he is a wise man!’ Is it not so?
There is no such things as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature.
We run to place and power over the dead bodies of those who fail and fall; ay, we win the food we eat from out the mouths of starving babes.
Adventurer: he that goes to meet whatever may come. Well, that is what we all do in the world one way or another...