A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.
A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
A mistress never is nor can be a friend. While you agree, you are lovers; and when it is over, anything but friends.
A thousand years may scare form a state. An hour may lay it in ruins.
A woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and Champagne, the only true feminine and becoming viands.
Absence – that common cure of love.
Adversity is the first path to truth.
All who joy would win must share it. Happiness was born a Twin.
Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.
America is a model of force and freedom and moderation – with all the coarseness and rudeness of its people.
As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions and resist or endure those of others.
Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.
Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.
But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.
Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep.
Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life – and if Virtue is not its own reward I don’t know any other stipend annexed to it.
Fame is the thirst of youth.
Folly loves the martyrdom of fame.
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.
For in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.
For pleasures past I do not grieve, nor perils gathering near; My greatest grief is that I leave nothing that claims a tear.
For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
Friendship is Love without his wings!
Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into friendship.
He who is only just is cruel. Who on earth could live were all judged justly?
He who surpasses or subdues mankind, must look down on the hate of those below.
Her great merit is finding out mine – there is nothing so amiable as discernment.
I am about to be married, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.
I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting.
I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains.
I do detest everything which is not perfectly mutual.
I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.
I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves.
I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.
I have no consistency, except in politics; and that probably arises from my indifference to the subject altogether.
I know that two and two make four – and should be glad to prove it too if I could – though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.
I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.
I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor.
If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company.
If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.
If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher’s cleaver.
In England the only homage which they pay to Virtue – is hypocrisy.
In solitude, where we are least alone.
It is odd but agitation or contest of any kind gives a rebound to my spirits and sets me up for a time.
It is useless to tell one not to reason but to believe – you might as well tell a man not to wake but sleep.
It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.
Let none think to fly the danger for soon or late love is his own avenger.
Life’s enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.
Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.
Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.
Lovers may be – and indeed generally are – enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations.
Man is born passionate of body, but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good in his main-spring of Mind. But God help us all! It is at present a sad jar of atoms.
Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.
Man’s love is of man’s life a part; it is a woman’s whole existence. In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.
Men are the sport of circumstances when it seems circumstances are the sport of men.
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.
Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers.
My turn of mind is so given to taking things in the absurd point of view, that it breaks out in spite of me every now and then.
One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if once mine gets out, I’ll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that of any other.
Opinions are made to be changed – or how is truth to be got at?
Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions comes a people.
Prolonged endurance tames the bold.
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.
Smiles form the channels of a future tear.
Society is now one polished horde, formed of two mighty tries, the Bores and Bored.
Sometimes we are less unhappy in being deceived by those we love, than in being undeceived by them.
Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.
The ‘good old times’ – all times when old are good.
The beginning of atonement is the sense of its necessity.
The busy have no time for tears.
The Cardinal is at his wit’s end – it is true that he had not far to go.
The dew of compassion is a tear.
The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.
The heart will break, but broken live on.
The place is very well and quiet and the children only scream in a low voice.
The poor dog, in life the firmest friend. The first to welcome, foremost to defend.
There is no instinct like that of the heart.
There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.
There’s naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms as rum and true religion.
They never fail who die in a great cause.
This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.
This man is freed from servile bands, Of hope to rise, or fear to fall; Lord of himself, though not of lands, And leaving nothing, yet hath all.
‘Tis pleasant, sure, to see one’s name in print. A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in ‘t.
‘Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.
Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.
Though I love my country, I do not love my countrymen.
Though sages may pour out their wisdom’s treasure, there is no sterner moralist than pleasure.
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.
We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.
What a strange thing man is; and what a stranger thing woman.
What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.
What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life’s page, And be alone on earth, as I am now.
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.
Who loves, raves.
Who tracks the steps of glory to the grave?
Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire – in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?
Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!
Yes, love indeed is light from heaven; A spark of that immortal fire with angels shared, by Allah given to lift from earth our low desire.
