“Weaklings must lie.”
“The miracles of earth are the laws of heaven.”
“Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time.”
“Death gives us sleep, eternal youth, and immortality.”
“Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smoothest.”
“It is simpler and easier to flatter people than to praise them.”
“Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it.”
“Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.”
“Variety of mere nothings gives more pleasure than uniformity of something.”
“A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another s.”
“Every friend is to the other a sun, and a sunflower also. He attracts and follows.”
“Every man has a rainy corner of his life whence comes foul weather which follows him.”
“Strong characters are brought out by change of situation, and gentle ones by permanence.”
“Courage consists not in blindly overlooking danger, but in seeing it, and conquering it.”
“Humanity is never so beautiful as when praying for forgiveness, or else forgiving another.”
“Joy descends gently upon us like the evening dew, and does not patter down like a hailstorm.”
“Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good action; try to use ordinary situations.”
“Sorrows are like thunderclouds, in the distance they look black, over our heads scarcely gray.”
“Gray hairs seem to my fancy like the soft light of the moon, silvering over the evening of life.”
“I have made as much out of myself as could be made of the stuff, and no man should require more.”
“The darkness of death is like the evening twilight; it makes all objects appear more lovely to the dying.”
“A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterwards.”
“Woman and men of retiring timidity are cowardly only in dangers which affect themselves, but the first to rescue when others are in danger.”
“The conscience of children is formed by the influences that surround them; their notions of good and evil are the result of the moral atmosphere they breathe.”
“Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.”
“The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but, as in whispering galleries, they are clearly heard at the end, and by posterity.”
“As winter strips the leaves from around us, so that we may see the distant regions they formerly concealed, so old age takes away our enjoyments only to enlarge the prospect of the coming eternity.”
“Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.”
“We learn our virtues from our friends who love us; our faults from the enemy who hates us. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror, on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of the reflection.”
“A woman who could always love would never grow old; and the love of mother and wife would often give or preserve many charms if it were not too often combined with parental and conjugal anger. There remains in the face of women who are naturally serene and peaceful, and of those rendered so by religion, an after-spring, and later an after-summer, the reflex of their most beautiful bloom.”