The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined - to strengthen each other - to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Consequences are unpitying.

Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

Breed is stronger than pasture.