Sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen.
Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom’s Day.
A man’s bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.
Technologies of easy travel give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot?
Let the black flower blossom as it may!
Nervous and excitable persons need to talk a great deal, by way of letting off their steam.
The moment when a man’s head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
Or-but this more rarely happened-she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it.
The best of us being unfit to die, what an unexpressible absurdity to put the worst to death.
Dream strange things and make them look like truth.
Men of cold passions have quick eyes.
The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.
Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love to sew; especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts than while so occupied.
We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right.
The present is burthened too much with the past.
Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collectso some writers are lost in their collected learning.
We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.
There is an alchemy of quiet malice by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles.
Let the attempt be made, at whatever risk.
My wife is – in the strictest sense – my sole companion, and I need no other. There is no vacancy in my mind any more than in my heart.