Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.

Our system of morality is a body of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

Take a music-bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which we call his reputation.

Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but he stuns and stupefies.

With effervescing opinions, as with the not yet forgotten champagne, the quickest way to let them go flat is to let them get exposed to the air.

A man's opinions are generally of much more value than his arguments.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.