"He who indulges habitually in the intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a more intolerable and utter prostration."

"For marriage is like life in this-that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses."

"This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing."

"Nothing like a little judicious levity."

"We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series."

"A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task."

"I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect."

"He who sows hurry reaps indigestion."

"We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature."

"If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong."

"To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and fall."

"Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses."

"Nothing made by brute force lasts."

"I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgement. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden, and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask."