"If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence."

"We grow weary of those things (and perhaps soonest) which we most desire."

"The history of art is the history of revivals."

"To put one's trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it."

"Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often."

"The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way."

"Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both."

"If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do."

"A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct."

"We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them."

"The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation."

"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."

"Theist and atheist: the fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name."

"What runs through a person like water through a sieve."

"Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it."

"We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them."

"Oaths are but words, and words are but wind."

"Friendship is like money, easier made than kept."

"I have never written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong."

"Be virtuous and you will be vicious."

"Neither irony or sarcasm is argument."

"Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another."

"We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them."

"The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money."

"To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead."

"Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint."

"Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it."

"Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine."

"Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions."

"All truth is not to be told at all times."

"There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth."

"Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance."

"It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something."

"Mention but the word "divinity," and our sense of the divine is clouded."

"A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy."

"Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness."

"There is one thing certain namely that we can have nothing certain therefore it is not certain that we can have nothing certain."

"It is tact that is golden, not silence."

"A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war."

"Life is not an exact science, it is an art."

"Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule."

"One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once."

"If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death."

"Man unlike the animal has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it."

"It is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is often exceedingly difficult to find this out."

"Whatso'er we perpetrate We do but row we are steered by fate."

"In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation."

"Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature."

"To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all."

"Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost."