It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none. But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say.

A woman loves to be obeyed at first, although afterwards she finds her pleasure in obeying.

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?

A woman can earn her pardon for a good year of disobedience by a single adroit submission.

There are circumstances in which even the least energetic of mankind learn to behave with vigour and decision; and the most cautious forget their prudence and embrace foolhardy resolutions.

Decisive actions are often taken in a moment and without any conscious deliverance from the rational parts of man.

I confess I have no great notion of the use of books, except to amuse a railway journey; although, I believe, there are some very exact treatises on astronomy, the use of the globes, agriculture, and the art of making paper flowers. Upon the less apparent provinces of life I fear you will find nothing truthful.

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

A man, Mr. Scrymgeour, may fall into a thousand perplexities, but if his heart be upright and his intelligence unclouded, he will issue from them all without dishonour.

Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?

People trifle with love. Now, I deny that love is a strong passion. Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.

A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.

The world is a great place and stocked with wealth and beauty, and there is no limit to the rewards that may be offered. Such an one who would refuse a million of money may sell his honour for an empire or the love of a woman.

An appeal to his alarm is never a good plan to rid oneself of a spirited young man.

Time passes quickly with lovers.

There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear.

Sanity itself is a kind of convention.

The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.

It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation.

Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.

Though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load.

But the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men.

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener.

This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.

The old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities.

In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence.

To spendthrifts money is so living and actual-it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune-that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath.

When things fall out opportunely for the person concerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how or why, his own immediate personal convenience seeming a sufficient reason for the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary things.

When a man is in a fair way and sees all life open in front of him, he seems to himself to make a very important figure in the world. His horse whinnies to him; the trumpets blow and the girls look out of window as he rides into town before his company; he receives many assurances of trust and regard--sometimes by express in a letter--sometimes face to face, with persons of great consequence falling on his neck. It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as Hercules or as wise as Solomon, he is soon forgotten.

And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations.

Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.

If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences-for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect-if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack!

The wine is bottled poetry.

Them that die will be the lucky ones!

There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. ... They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.

Youth now flees on feathered foot.

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

There is but one art, to omit.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about.