1. 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.

2. Prolonged endurance tames the bold.

3. Men are the sport of circumstances when it seems circumstances are the sport of men.

4. To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

5. Man’s conscience is the oracle of God.

6. Fame is the thirst of youth.

7. Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

8. What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.

9. Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep.

10. In England the only homage which they pay to Virtue – is hypocrisy.

11. I am sure of nothing so little as my own intentions.

12. ‘Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come.

13. Who loves, raves.

14. Smiles form the channels of a future tear.

15. I can’t but say it is an awkward sight to see one’s native land receding through the growing waters; it unmans one quite, especially when life is rather new.

16. Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.

17. Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.

18. Self-love for ever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens to stumble upon it.

19. There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

20. Sometimes we are less unhappy in being deceived by those we love, than in being undeceived by them.

21. Absence – that common cure of love.

22. Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.

23. There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever have themselves in such a state?

24. Friendship is Love without his wings!

25. If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

26. “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.

27. I have no consistency, except in politics; and that probably arises from my indifference to the subject altogether.

28. The poor dog, in life the firmest friend. The first to welcome, foremost to defend.

29. Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into friendship.

30. 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.

31. 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.

32. There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

33. They never fail who die in a great cause.

34. Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.

35. For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

36. He who surpasses or subdues mankind, must look down on the hate of those below.

37. Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

38. What a strange thing man is; and what a stranger thing woman.

39. Who tracks the steps of glory to the grave?

40. Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure.